Formwork Labs Demo Day

Shameless plug for the upcoming Formwork Labs Demo Day!

This is the first in-person get together for the Formwork Labs cohort!

The Demo Day for the inaugural cohort of Formwork Labs will take place on Wednesday September 7th at 4pm Chicago time. If you are interested in joining virtually, you can register for the livestream here.

Over the last few months, I (along with many industry professionals—huge thank you to our mentors!) had the opportunity to work with each of the Formwork Labs startups. It has been a pleasure to see how they have grown and developed during our program—and the collaboration doesn’t end at Demo Day!

One of the main goals of the program is to facilitate customer conversations and to talk about the nuances of building for and selling to the construction industry. We want Formwork Labs to be the crash course for both construction and construction tech. During our first formal in-person get together, my good friend Phil Lazarus helped facilitate a tour of the Lendlease Southbank project in Chicago, IL. I’m also looking forward to visiting Walsh’s Salesforce Tower project along the river when we are in Chicago for Demo Day (special thanks to Dan Smolilo for setting it up).

As we approach Demo Day and the end of the formal portion of Formwork Labs, I have been reflecting about the growth of the startups and digging back into why they were accepted into the program in the first place. So here’s my version of a “why we invested,” though it’s more like a “why we accepted” and “why I’m excited” given the stage of companies.

As with all early stage companies and this article living on in the internet forever, please find and follow these startups separately to get their latest news and product updates.

Introducing the Formwork Labs Inaugural Cohort!

Automatic Construction

Automatic Construction is a technology platform built around Inflatable Flexible Factory Formwork. IFFF is a patent pending method for building code compliant buildings at 1/5th the cost versus existing methods and in less time and co2 emissions.

Team: Alex Bell, Tyler Robins

HQ: New York, USA

I met Alex back in April 2021 and he was introduced to Brick & Mortar Ventures through a mutual VC contact. Having worked in construction, I knew how expensive and annoying the formwork scope of work is (ironic that the program is called Formwork Labs because of formwork’s importance in construction—hey, I challenge Alex to make formwork obsolete and force us into changing the program name). A few of my team members have also echoed the same sentiment around formwork and we collectively agreed that Automatic Construction was interesting, though they would benefit from speaking with more industry professionals and potentially going after some non-dilutive funding. Fast forward a year, Alex applied for the accelerator program and was accepted based on the value they would get out of the many customer conversations arranged through the program. My biggest goal for Automatic Construction at the beginning of the program was to explore other types of products and use cases for their technology. They came into the program with experience in ADU’s and housing, but I wanted their market to expand and for the team to have a clearer picture of the applicability of their technology across all concrete construction. I’m excited that they have found some promising use cases for their technology, which they will be showcasing during Demo Day!

Buildpeer

Buildpeer is where you manage, visualize and document all your construction information in one place, it’s where the office and job-site get together to communicate and share information. We want people to know their project and enjoy the process.

Team: Mauricio Valdes, Ernesto González Fernández, Eugenio G. de la Garza, Carlos Rousseau

HQ: Monterrey, Mexico

Everywhere I travel, I love looking at how construction is done—whether this is across the US (different regions are quite different) or to a new country (construction in Bali, Indonesia is very, very interesting). I also spent 2.5 years with DPR Construction in Singapore studying the Southeast Asia construction market and saw so many opportunities for new technologies that just haven’t penetrated that region yet. Procore tried entering the Southeast Asia market by way of Australia, but struggled. And since joining Brick & Mortar Ventures, I’ve met VC’s whose playbook is to invest in “The [insert US unicorn] of [insert region of the world]” and have always been intrigued about these opportunities for construction tech. Buildpeer can be easily described as “procore-light” and has a likeness to Fieldwire (Brick & Mortar Fund I portfolio company acquired by Hilti). I like to call Buildpeer the “Procore for LATAM” but in reality, there’s opportunity to expand into Southeast Asia and other emerging markets (like Africa) in the future. Let’s see how the expansion strategy changes over time, but I’m excited that the Buildpeer team is iterating quickly and taking a lot of the best practices across borders and applying it to their product.

Multipliciti

Team: Hao Li, Xiaoyu Wang

HQ: New York, USA

Hao and I connected back in September 2020 (wow, two years ago!). At that time, I had spoken with so many material marketplaces and saw how difficult it was to scale and onboard both the buyer and supplier sides. I gave Hao that feedback and received regular email updates until she applied for the Formwork Labs accelerator program. Multipliciti had gone through many learnings and a few pivots over the last 2 years and have stuck to their core of material procurement, but innovated on their approach. Through the program, they have also explored all sorts of equipment and material to purchase and have gained interesting insights around the construction material supply chain through the many customer conversations. Today, they are taking a direct-from-factory approach for sourcing construction materials in this wildly insane time period where most projects are facing material shortages or supply chain issues. In the near term, there are a couple of interesting ideas to boost margins for Multiplicit and I’m excited for what’s to come!

Nickel

Team: Ray Fu, Claudio Wilson

HQ: New York, USA

During my time as a project engineer at DPR, I was tasked with doing some forensic analysis around payments, billings, material installed on site, BIM material take-offs and stored materials to help a project manager evaluate whether or not a subcontractor was about to go under. I had a front row view into how subcontractors can play the pay app game, how a GC can review all relevant information to ‘read between the lines,’ and why cash flow was such a big deal on construction projects. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an influx of startups in the financials/financing space—we even have an investment in Siteline (Brick & Mortar Ventures Fund I)! Given how complex the construction supply chain is, there are varying GTM strategies and varying points of entry for these tech providers. It is not going to be a winner takes all opportunity, thus it made sense to look at a different part of the overall process. I got to know Ray before he quit his full time job and loved his vision for what construction finance needed to look like. I was excited to hear that he recruited Claudio to join him on this journey—pairing up his personal insurance, finance and construction industry strategy experience with Claudio’s experience building the payments infrastructure for Airbnb. I think their first product to simplify collaboration and communication for subcontractor-distributor workflows is a great start to a huge fintech/constructiontech platform.

Simple Construction Software

Team: Andrius Sutas, Stuart Johnson

HQ: London, UK

Most contractors (or maybe even people in general) cringe at change orders, change management and contracts. I define construction as managing risk via contracts—who would’ve thought! Managing changes and making sure they flow downstream through the entire construction supply chain (of many, many companies) takes a lot of administrative work using the current processes and technologies. This is why so many changes get missed and lawsuits and claims are so rampant in construction. Luckily, I worked for a GC that was not litigious, but these missed changes still led to many unfavorable conversations. Simple is helping contractors manage some of these contractual workflows and make sure that all relevant parties are included in the process. As they continue to build out this tool, they have an incredible opportunity to be the information repository for projects and build tools around that information to automate mundane workflows. I know this all sounds as little vague at the moment, but I don’t want to give away too much of their secret sauce. ;)

Let’s build better.

I hope you enjoyed learning about each of the Formwork Labs startups! If you are interested in learning more about them, please feel free to reach out to them directly or let me know and I’m happy to connect you! If you are interested in hearing more about how I think about each of these companies, please feel free to reach out—I’m an open book.

If you know of any entrepreneurs interested in the construction tech space, please have them reach out to me! We hope to announce information regarding the second run of Formwork Labs soon.

You can follow along at LinkedIn, Instagram (@formworklabsaccelerator) or our website.