The Toronto startup wants to help firms like EllisDon with pre-construction work.
Security wants to help specialists during the construction phase act faster and minimize errors using artificial intelligence (AI).
The regulation aims to create “the most accurate co-pilot for construction estimators.”
The Toronto-based construction technology startup has received US$7 million ($9.8 million CAD) in seed funding to develop its second artificial intelligence pilot that helps construction estimators find information and identify risks and opportunities based on project documents.
The round, which closed in August, was led by Cercano Management with support from new backer Jamie McDonald of Black & McDonald, as well as existing investors. Y-combinator and One Way Ventures. This will bring Provision's total funding to $8.7 million.
Provision was founded in 2022 by CEO Luigi La Corte and CTO Brendan Arda, a pair of entrepreneurs with combined experience in construction, technology and investing.
La Corte, the son of an immigrant general contractor, worked in civil engineering at Arup and invested in infrastructure through the Plenary Group. Arda, a surveyor by training, previously served as CTO at HR start-up Jem HR and co-founded student housing marketplace DigsConnect.
The Statement states that billions of dollars are lost each year due to errors that may have been discovered during the pre-construction phase of projects, from design errors to misunderstandings of scope of work and inaccurate estimates.
With Provision, La Corte and Arda aim to create “the most accurate co-pilot for construction estimators” who must determine project costs by reviewing huge sets of complex documents. The provision is intended to make life easier for appraisers by helping them answer targeted questions about documents quickly and accurately.
“We initially started out helping mitigate risk on different projects, but we found that estimators had the biggest incentive to get it right during the process,” La Corte told BetaKit. “Initially we simply pointed out risks, but now we help construction teams reduce the time it takes to prepare estimates.”
La Corte said the company is developing its own models for specialized problems that existing large language models cannot solve effectively. The startup is betting that its specialized AI products, including Project Review, Chat Agent and Scope Agent, are better suited to this task than more general-purpose chatbots.
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In the construction industry, the cost of mistakes during the planning stage can be high, as serious or repeated miscalculations can lead to legal problems and business failure.
While Provision believes AI models can improve the productivity of construction surveyors, there is also a risk that AI-generated responses will present false or misleading information as fact, a concern seems to be increasing with recent, more complex models.
“Given the high risk of miscalculation, we invest heavily in creating data sets to achieve an accuracy of up to 99 percent,” La Corte said. “This is very difficult because there are no public datasets and creating them requires care.”
La Corte said Provision's long-term plan is to help companies “review any pre-production work with multiple agents who work alongside estimators to ensure there are no errors.”
Provision's popularity helped it attract investors. The company already works with major construction firms in Europe and Canada such as Acciona, Bird Construction, Colas, EllisDon and PCL Construction, and says it has handled $100 billion worth of projects after growing nearly 10-fold last year to more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue. The startup plans to add eight more employees to its team of 10 in the near future.
Image provided Freepick.
