Construction-tech startups are trying to disrupt a notoriously old-school industry. Here's how 2 founders went from gaming backgrounds to launching in the buzzy space.
- Construction labor costs continue to increase and construction productivity has been flat for decades. These forces have created demand for cheaper construction, leading to the application of new tech like machine learning, robotics, 3D-imaging, and drones.
- This has lead startups like Fieldwire, a software program for construction teams.
- We spoke to the firm's two founders about their background in gaming, and how their professional experience has factored in as they tried to break into a buzzy field.
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While gaming may not seem like the natural birthplace for a construction-technology startup, that was the genesis of Fieldwire, which sells software for construction teams.
Founders Yves Frinault and Javed Singha met at video game production company Ubisoft before they decided to use their experience in gaming to build digital tools for construction workers.
With proptech funding booming and experts predicting that housing prices will continue to rise in the 2020s, a new slew of construction technology - or contech, for short - startups like Fieldwire have emerged that are aiming to make building cheaper, easier, and safer.
While the sector hasn't received nearly as much attention as fintech or its cousin, proptech, it has received at least $27 billion in funding since 2008, according to McKinsey Partner Jose Luis Blanco.
Fieldwire raised $33.5 million in funding last September led by Menlo Ventures and others, according to a press release. At the time, it had raised $40.4 million to date.
At Ubisoft, Frinault and Singha worked together to restructure part of the company. Frinault, a product manager, said that his time at Ubisoft was his first entrepreneurial experience.
"Running a game team inside a company is very similar to running a company," Frinault said, highlighting the challenge of recruiting the best internal talent and keeping a budget as some of the overlaps.
While they met in gaming, Frinault had an MS in construction engineering management from Stanford University, inspired by his family's history of purchasing and remodeling residential real estate. As Frinault and Singha kept talking, they realized that they wanted to make technology for construction workers in the field.
"We wanted to replicate tools that are available to us in gaming to the construction space," Frinault said.
They used some of the principles of the gaming industry to inform their design.
"We were putting a product together that we can deliver directly to them, and that they can work on immediately without any training," Singha said, explaining how the lack of technical literacy in construction made a simple user interface and design extremely important. If they can't convince the workers in the field to use their product, it would be impossible for the product to grow.
Another asset was their shared experience working on social games at Ubisoft, where they had to make sure that the games worked for both mobile and desktop users. They wanted Fieldwire to be totally functional in the field, and that experience designing cross-platform was invaluable.
Singha said that his biggest challenge was making sure that he understood enough about their potential users, construction workers on the ground, to design a product that was actually useful to them.
"It was a rough crash course for me personally," Singha said. "I had to learn a whole new lingo."