Workers in the home construction under construction in the Las Palma area of Medellin, Colombia on Wednesday, July 16th, 2025.
Esteban Vanegas | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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For a long time, residential construction has been one of the slowest industries to modernize, and commercial construction is not too late. Its size is huge, but still, it is one of the world’s least digital industries.
The lack of innovation in commercial technology contributes to outdated documentation and errors of tasks, and then requires redoing administrative drugs. It is a large drainage drain of time, budget and materials, which can lead to costly delays and unnecessary environmental waste.
According to an August 2024 report from the McKinsey Global Institute, it contributes to losing nearly $1 trillion in productivity each year. Historically, construction companies have spent an average of less than 1% of their revenues. This was less than a third of what is common in automobiles and aerospace, according to the report.
Sarah Buchner learned all this in the difficult way. The daughter of an Austrian carpenter, she came to the US to learn to build and worked towards Foreman, the supervisor and ultimately the contractor.
“At peak, I was running a $400 million high-rise, 600 guys working for me at work, and on that particular construction side, a lot happened during the construction,” she said. “But I think I was very young and couldn’t handle what was going on completely.”
So Buchner decided to build a health and safety app to switch careers from construction to construction software and construction technology. Ten years later, with the proliferation of AI, she launched Trunk Tools, a generative AI platform trained in real construction workflows. Automate some of the more boring tasks, identify project risks, and simplify documentation.
“We have all the unstructured documents at the construction site and we’ll rebuild them using a variety of AI and machine learning tools,” Buchner explained, noting that the average high-rise project in New York City costs around $5 billion and requires around 3.5 million pages of documentation.
“These pages change every day because plans don’t finish by the time construction begins,” Buchner says.
Therefore, contractors often receive conflicting orders and cannot search and clarify documents. For example, install an emergency exit door. One dataset says that electricity is needed, but the electrical drawings do not have outlets. It says that inconsistencies in the data not only waste money, but also contribute to carbon emissions due to work inefficiency.
Trunk Tool technology can process millions of unstructured documents, from blueprints to drawings, schedules and specifications, and return them in a clearer format that workers can better follow. The startup has partnered with Microsoft to integrate technology into the company’s set of options.
Trunk Tools has announced a $40 million Series B funding round led by Global Software Investor Insight Partners. Participated from RedpointVentures, Innovation Endeavors, Stepstone and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prodence. This investment brings total funds to $70 million.
