Oct 10, 2023

AI Clearing – an AI-powered autonomous construction progress tracking and quality control platform – recently announced its $14 million Series A funding round. This round was led by Prudence with participation from FJ Labs and existing investors Tera Ventures, Inovo, and Innovation Nest. AI Clearing’s technology enables contractors, owners, and lenders to track construction progress and quality in real time and accurately. This pain point is especially acute in AI Clearing’s core market of large infrastructure projects like utility-scale solar, railways, roads, pipelines, airports, industrial, and power transmission lines. They typically have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and with millions of items to be constructed or installed on-site. Before AI Clearing, these large sites were tracked manually, with a 5% to 10% sample area covered monthly. This is insufficient for accurate project control and often results in substantial budget overruns, delays, and disputes between the involved parties. AI Clearing’s technology is fully automated and compares the on-site progress to the design, budget, and schedule. The infrastructure construction market is massive with more than $4.5 trillion in annual spending globally and it is served by many of the largest construction firms in the world. AI Clearing is already partnered with 5 of the 20 largest companies on multiyear contracts, including Bechtel and PCL – which uses the platform across all its solar projects in North America and Australia. The platform is also easy to adopt and fits seamlessly into existing industry workflows, including through an integration with Oracle’s Primavera P6 platform, the most widely used scheduling software for construction. From a macro scale, the infrastructure construction market is growing at a 5% to 6% rate annually as the sector proved to be recession-immune. This growth will continue – fueled by the energy transformation (utility-scale solar) and state-led infrastructure investments. But what started to be a challenge was the availability of quality and supervision engineers over the last two years, twice as many were retiring from the construction industry than coming in. And AI Clearing platform also solves this challenge, enabling the delivery of more projects with the same number of supervision personnel and with the higher quality. KEY QUOTES: “This funding round positions us to capitalize on the digital transformation of construction project management. In the past 12 months, we have achieved 15x revenue growth. This new financing enables us to expand our sales and client success teams across the United States, Western Europe, and the Gulf region. We are enthusiastic about our collaboration with Prudence, an investor who has demonstrated a deep understanding of both our technology and industry and who shares our vision of becoming the category leader in autonomous project control.” Michael Mazur, CEO and Co-Founder of AI Clearing “Our AI is proprietary and unique. This has allowed us to build the best technology in the industry, provide real-time insights, and drive strong operational efficiencies for our customers. From the napkin idea phase, we knew that industry-specific, daily data combined with the ability to ingest and compare against project designs and schedules would be fundamental for us to build our AI. We spent three years building and optimizing our technology to ensure it was right. Our large and unique training data and proprietary AI engine enable us to achieve unparalleled accuracy and processing time – both critical to our customers.” Adam Wisniewski, CTO and Co-founder of AI Clearing “Owners and contractors on large infrastructure projects face large potential liabilities due to project delays or poor quality leading to reworks. These issues can lead to tens of millions of dollars in cost overruns and disputes. AI Clearing has developed the best-in-class and most technical solution to a problem that cannot be solved with people and processes. The construction industry is actively adopting solutions to these significant and unmet needs, which is why AI Clearing has earned the trust of many of the industry’s largest and most sophisticated companies.” Jordan Viniar, Partner at Prudence, who will join the Board of Directors Trending on Pulse 2.0