Construction Startup Industry: Emerging Technologies & Digital Transformation

1. As venture capitalists finding the best technology or company to invest in, what are the most significant aspects you keep in mind when talking to a Construction Tech Startup? How do you identify the truly revolutionary innovators to invest in?

One simple method is to see if they have revenue traction and how that is growing.

Another is to share it with some of our LP investors in our fund that are in the construction industry and real estate industries and have them reach out to prospective customers. This helps us triangulate if it is good or not and even if we don’t invest, we can make some customer intros for good karma and help the startup. Or if we do invest, we are able to add value even before we invested. That’s the best due diligence to see if the “dogs are eating the dog food.”

We also have a sizable technology software engineering offshore partner in in Ukraine we partner with and can have them come in and conduct a full tech audit. Sometimes we find some missing bits in the tech or things that need improvement and we can even use our Ukrainian engineers to quickly and cost effectively fix or fill in missing bits and even get into a long term engineering relationship or haver the startup hire our engineers full time.

2. What are the latest construction technologies, according to you, that are dominating the Construction space right now?

We are excited about our recent investment into Kwant AI (https://www.kwant.ai/). When we introduce them to a construction company they come in with a non-debatable solution to reduce fatalities and injuries and the cash cost not to mention human and moral loss avoided and reduced pays for the cost of the set up and annual license cost. Then it tends to lower the total cost of a large construction project by 11 to 17 percent . They have this documented and now they are growing like crazy. With great reference customers like the Delta terminal at JFK airport, Microsoft data center in Singapore and a large Modelo beer factory in Mexico it’s clear they are poised to take on global customers everywhere having a great impact, saving lives and increasing products and competitiveness of our customers.

• Kwant AI is the first company to use a proprietary low-powered sensors network to automate construction site data collection to improve safety and productivity

• Provides actionable analytics like schedule and cost risk, early warning signals to optimize the workforce and predict and prevent safety incidents

• It collects real-time location, time, identification, and activity data of craft-workers and assets using minimal infrastructure not possible before and visualizes in a 3D heatmap

• Their platform empowers owners, real estate developers, builders, and insurance companies to measure and mitigates risks while lowering costs of large construction projects

3. As the CEO of the VC firm that has launched dozens of companies to success, what are some of the strategies that you follow in guiding the startups in their journey?

I could write a book on this topic and in fact I have written three books on this topic and working on a 4^th, but to share a few key points, most important is keep an eye on cash and don’t run out of cash. The levers available to a startup to not run out of cash are generate cash from customers that can be used to cover all or some of your expenses, raise cash from investors (we tend to not like grants unless they are painless), reduce expenses.

The other key point is that everything is about talent. Startups are all about execution and execution is all about team. Our team acts like a heat-seeking missile in search of the best talent digitizing large markets with innovative technology. The good silver lining about the stock market crashing, crypto crashing, interest rates rising and entering into an uncertain recession is that large corporations and some startups layoff a lot of talented people and startups raise smaller rounds enabling them to hire fewer people. So there is more talent a startup can access and that’s the key to success.

All SaaS startups should use the solution from our portfolio company Place Technology (https://www.placetechnology.com/) which accurately tracks SaaS metrics in real time, effortlessly assembling cash forecasts, and understanding the financial implications of all the plans and decisions startups make to grow their businesses. They are releasing more modules shortly which are essentially digitizing the process of the CEO who is a wizard at cash management and measuring the custom accounting / KPI metrics to grow a smart venture backed startup. We love this company and so will every SaaS startup from small to mega.

4. Before your present role as CEO, you have worked at several other VC firms. What are some of your experiences that empowered you to enhance your business model at 7BC Venture Capital?

At my previous venture models we could never agree on selling small slices of our fund position early to return the fund faster. Now at 7BC Venture Capital we have innovated a new model where if we invest in a startup and the valuation goes up significantly with subsequent funding rounds our fund can sell between 5 and 30 percent  of our position for cash now and leave the rest for the final exit. This enables us to return the fund much faster de-risking the investment into our fund for our LPs and provides them with liquidity to re-up and invest in our next VC fund every 3 years or so.

We also offer each LP to stay in the deal and not sell early by “recycling” their portion of the early exit into our SPV and stay in the deal. We also offer them to invest more cash in these growth rounds which are expected to have much lower multiple of cash on cash returns, but lower risk and should exit sooner as they are closer to the finish line. So we end up selling to our selves. This way our LP investor get cash back sooner, can stay in the deal or access direct late stage investment opportunities where we have information rights and are on the inside. Many of our LPs have met the CEOs at our private events by this point.

5. As an ending note, what is your advice for other senior leaders and CXOs in the Construction Tech landscape?

Develop software that automates human workflows and connects to public and proprietary data sets. Make something customers want and are willing to pay for. Find your niche that works and nail your sales organization for execution and keep adding more modules to go from being a point solution to an end-to-end solution customers can’t live without. And consider letting 7BC Venture Capital invest in your startup to put our network of support behind you.