Planning a building — projecting timelines, manpower needs and costs — is among the most complex and uncertain tasks in the construction industry. A major development such as a skyscraper can take months to estimate and cost millions of dollars to design and engineer. Even at the bidding stage, engineering firms invest significant time and money, knowing they’re likely to win the work less than 10% of the time. A New Haven technology startup says it can shrink that painstaking process from months to about seven minutes using artificial intelligence. “LeanCon is building the first pre-construction engineering team created by artificial intelligence,” is the way that co-founder Ziv Levi pitches his product. Investors have taken interest. The company recently announced a $6 million seed funding round, double its initial target. Levi and his co-founder Sapir Tubul are both construction engineers by trade. They grew up in Israel and began working on construction sites with their engineer fathers. They later met as civil engineering undergraduates at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. After graduation, the two took different paths. Levi earned a master’s degree in civil engineering and later completed an MBA at Yale. Tubul earned a master’s degree in computer science, specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Levi said the idea for LeanCon grew out of his experience working as a construction engineer, where he dealt firsthand with the complexities of planning large projects.
New Haven startup raises $6M for AI-driven construction planning
