A worker inside a residential building under construction in the Las Palmas district of Medellin, Colombia, Wednesday July 16, 2025.
Esteban Vanegas | Bloomberg | Getty images
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The construction of houses has long been one of the slowest industries to modernize, and commercial construction is not far behind. Its scale is enormous, and yet it remains one of the least digitized industries in the world.
This lack of innovation in commercial technology contributes to outdated documentation and errors in tasks which must then be reflected as well as administrative trail. It is a huge drain in time, budgets and materials and can cause expensive delays and unnecessary environmental waste.
All in all, it contributes to nearly 1 billion of dollars of productivity loss each year, according to a August 2024 report of the McKinsey Global Institute. Historically, construction companies have spent on average less than 1% of income, less than a third of what is common in the automobile and aerospace, according to the report.
Sarah Buchner learned all of this. Daughter of a carpenter in Austria, she came to the United States to learn the construction and progressed to the foreman, superintendent and possibly entrepreneur.
“At the top, I directed a large skyscraper of $ 400 million, 600 guys working for me in work. And on this side of the specific construction, I had a death, which is unfortunately happening,” she said. “But I was, I think, very young, and I couldn’t completely treat what was going on.”
Buchner therefore decided to build a health and safety application, from construction quarries to construction software and construction technologies. A decade later, with the proliferation of AI, she launched Trunk Tools, a generative AI platform formed on real construction workflows. It automates some of the most tedious tasks and also identifies project risks and simplifies documents.
“We take all the documents not structured on a construction site, and we use different AI and automatic learning tools to restructure it,” said Buchner, noting that a high-rise average project in New York, costing about half a billion dollars, would require around 3.5 million pages of documentation.
“These pages change every day, because planning is not over when you start construction,” said Buchner.
Thus, entrepreneurs often get contradictory orders and cannot search for documents to clarify. For example, take the installation of an emergency exit door. A set of data indicates that it needs electricity, but the electric drawings have no output there. Data directors, says Buchner, not only waste money, but contribute to carbon emissions due to the ineffectiveness of work.
Trunk Tools technology can deal with millions of unstructured documents, plans to drawings, including schedules and specifications, then return them in a clearer format than workers can follow better. The startup is associated with Microsoft to integrate technology into the continuation of company options.
Trunk Tools has just announced a 40 million dollars financing round in the B series led by Global Software Investor Insight is associated with the participation of Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence. This investment relates to total funding to $ 70 million.