Participants also include Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence. The new investment will bring the firm's total funding to $70 million that founder and CEO Sarah Buchner said will allow it to grow and address construction sector productivity.

Trunk Tools uses large language models and other AI-based technologies to organize and provide insight into millions of documents, drawings, specifications, RFIs, schedules and submittals generated throughout the lifecycle of a project. The platform allows building teams to ask natural-language questions and receive actionable answers sourced from relevant project documents.

Trunk Tools offers autonomous agents to perform tasks in workflows that until recently required humans to track down information and communicate it to crews. It also connects data to project schedules to flag potential issues before they lead to delays or rework.

When Trunk Tools released a natural language AI to assist with documentation in 2023, it was one of the first to bring natural language to jobsites and was quickly adopted by contractors such as Gilbane Building Co. and Suffolk Construction. Now, other vendors are pursuing natural language for construction processes.

"You need the best product out there, and for us to keep the market head start that we have, we need more engineering and are doubling down on that, Buchner told ENR..But the other thing we need to do is help industry with the behavioral change that is so hard,"

Buchner says the $40-million series B funding will support the New York City-based start-up to expand its engineering, product and go-to-market teams, as well as to grow its field enablement program and continue to scale the platform's capabilities across increasingly complex projects and through new and growing markets.

"Construction is the backbone of our global economy and daily life, yet the industry is still bogged down by outdated tools, fragmented systems and overwhelming bureaucracy," Buchner says. “We built Trunk Tools to eliminate the guesswork. General-purpose AI simply isn’t advanced enough for an industry built on proprietary data and complex workflows. This new round of funding gives us the resources to bring vertically-tailored AI reasoning agents to every job site."

Buchner developed Trunk Tools from her firsthand experience in construction, beginning her career as a carpenter at age 12 in her native Austria, then becoming a superintendent, project manager and group leader. Frustrated by daily jobsite inefficiencies, she pursued advanced degrees in civil engineering, data science and business to address these challenges at scale, ultimately moving to develop a new approach to how construction teams work.

Insight Partners, which led the round, is a venture capital and private equity firm also based in New York City that invests in high-growth technology, software and Internet business.

"Trunk Tools is helping define a new category of AI with its construction platform," says Jeff Horing, the invetor's co-founder and managing director, who will join the Trunk Tools board. "Project-level information in the construction industry lives in multiple siloed systems, and accessing that data is a time-consuming and error-prone process for field team members who need it in real time. Sarah and her team of construction tech experts are applying their deep industry experience to address this with modular AI agents."

Another AI puff piece. Gotta love the LLM and AI based technologies what ever the hell that means. She is doing a great job in raising money and getting some contractors on board but this small efficiency gain what is the impact to the bottom line? How is this increasing construction margins? AI tech isn’t cheap!