Briq raises over $3 million to predict outcomes in the construction industry

With spending reaching over $1.231 trillion, the United States is the one of the largest construction market worldwide. The construction industry is faced with a number of challenges. The failure rates for construction projects are consistently high. Construction projects take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled. Large projects are up to 80 percent over budget and 98 percent of mega projects suffer cost overruns of more than 30 percent. The construction industry also has great data wealth (a lot of unstructured data is created), but data in construction is poorly managed and rarely strategically leveraged. With these challenges come opportunities for tech startup companies. One startup that is aiming to tackle these problems is a Santa Barbara-based construction technology startup called Briq. Briq is a way to connect multiple  parties in the construction industry.

Briq was founded in 2017 and led by two longtime friends, both with prolific success stories. Ron Goldshmidt comes in as an experienced leader from Wall Street where he built quantitative-based trading businesses for dozens of global emerging markets, while Bassem Hamdy forged the path for today’s construction software landscape. Briq’s data intelligence and machine learning platform allows builders and asset managers to make better strategic decisions around the building process. This includes knowing which projects are more likely to be successful, where demand for new projects is highest, and how to better connect and automate workflows and data silos.

Today, Briq announced it has closed $3.025 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from MetaProp NYC. Briq is a construction technology company that uses adaptive intelligence and enterprise data to detect environmental, economic, and market landscape changes in the construction and real estate industries. Its platform is powered by a proprietary technology stack that combines an immutable ledger, an intelligence process automation (IPA) and API layer, and a series of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.

Briq uses private and public data to detect environmental, economic, and market landscape changes that impact business environments in construction and real estate, and produces solutions to react to them. Briq’s proprietary technology uses data in three distinct workflows: applies neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence algorithms to improve decision-making and provide business intelligence (Synapse), uses intelligent process automation (IPA) and API layers to power automation and data integration between data silos (Chronicle), and captures and warehouses enterprise data in an immutable ledger (Foundry).

“Bassem built and helped run the most successful construction software businesses in the world. It is rare and humbling to have an opportunity to help build a company from the ground up with an industry legend,” says Tim Young, Founding General Partner at Eniac Ventures. “The technology Bassem and his team are building will do something the industry has never seen before: break down data silos to leverage information in real time. Bassem has built and run the most successful construction software businesses in the world, and his knowledge of the construction space and the data space is second to none.”

The company has already implemented its tools with nearly a dozen clients, including Webcor, a major contractor on the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco, CA. “The unification of immutability and machine learning will give Webcor the ability to drive sophisticated data analytics for our core business,” says Kim Bates, the company’s Chief Innovation Officer. “For the first time in the industry, we’ve moved beyond reports – Briq’s technology helps us to understand what will happen, not what already has.”

“Construction and infrastructure are integral to society, but the decision-making process behind how, when, where, and why we build is no longer working,” said Briq Co-Founder & CEO Bassem Hamdy. “We aren’t just solving a construction problem, we are solving a societal problem. If we are to meet the infrastructure needs of both the developed and developing world, we must improve our decision-making and analysis around the data we have. We are thrilled to have the support of Eniac Ventures as we enter the next phase of our journey.”