3rd Gen AI tackles construction’s systemic knowledge loss problem
CONXAI, the first No Code AI Platform for the AEC industry, has raised €2.7m ($3m) in a pre-seed funding round led by Earlybird and co-led by A/O PropTech, Europe’s largest PropTech Venture Capital firm.
Other investors in the round include Pi Labs and Argonautic Ventures. The funding enables CONXAI to onboard new talents, scale adoption and broaden the platform’s capabilities.
The Munich-based start-up is led by CEO Sharique Husain, a successful entrepreneur who previously co-founded an AI start-up, Dive, as well as worked at Accenture Digital, and CTO Dr. Muralikrishna Sridhar, former Program Head of Autonomous AI (autonomous driving) at Continental AG and who earlier worked as a Post-Doc AI Researcher at DARPA.
The company is founded on the premise that a big part of the productivity problem in the construction industry can be solved by adopting a more “data-driven operations” approach.
The construction industry is awash in data; however, much of that remains under-utilised, e.g. an estimated 90% of the data generated during construction remains unused and up to 30% of the project data is lost by project closeout, resulting in massive knowledge loss.
Fragmentation of data and knowledge processing aggravate this problem by creating information silos. The effective and timely use of data can unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in new economic value. AI holds the key, but the conventional AI approaches are limited in applicability, scalability and affordability.
Sharique Husain, CEO of CONXAI, said: “CONXAI will make it easier for the AEC industry stakeholders to integrate and contextualize different types & formats of project lifecycle data, and transform them into actionable & reusable knowledge to make more informed decisions, faster. Use cases would be far-reaching, from enhanced jobsites visibility to delivering actionable insights for decision support and, in future, enabling autonomy in machinery & robotics.“Our mission is to turn the huge volume of under-utilised AEC data into trillions of dollars in new economic value, cut wastes and create a safer & more sustainable future for the industry.“We see a fast-growing demand of data innovation in the AEC industry. This pre-seed funding will enable us to capitalise on this demand and grow our team to deliver on our ambitious plan.”
CONXAI is building its platform with advanced 3rd generation “Explainable AI (XAI)” that uses transactional, sensor and historical project data, and different forms of knowledge to generate descriptive and prescriptive insights, tackling multiple use cases within construction at once, without the need to handcraft a new point solution for each new use case.
CONXAI’s No-Code play offers far-reaching potential even for non-tech users to configure and scale AI-powered analytics solutions in HSE, Logistics and Quality, much faster and at a fraction of the cost of conventional approaches.
Gregory Dewerpe, founder of A/O PropTech, said: “CONXAI brings no-code AI to the construction industry with an endless amount of potential use cases – from traditional workflows automation to powering next-generation advanced machinery or robotics. This will open and democratize the power of AI across more traditional users such as construction workers, project managers and health & safety experts to create more efficiency, data insights and transparency. CONXAI has the potential to transform how the construction industry operates at its core, enabling all the various stakeholders across project lifecycles”
