Construction/landscaping software startup Attentive.ai has raised $7 million to expand to new businesses.
CEO Shiva Dhawan announced the Series A round, led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday (Feb. 7).
According to a Thursday (Feb. 8) report by TechCrunch, the Delaware-based company provides a business management platform with artificial intelligence (AI)-based workflows to offer automation to companies in the landscaping and construction space.
The company’s platform helps contractors and landscapers save time and make effective bids for contracts using automated site measurements. The tool targets services like landscaping, paving and facilities maintenance and snow management.
“Earlier, businesses used to go on to the site, measure the site — go in with a measuring wheel and measure the entire site. It used to take hours and days,” Dhawan told Techcrunch.
Now they can just enter the address of that site. Computer vision will process all the available aerial imagery of that site and give you the data . . . we are also doing generative AI-based automatic scheduling of different properties and jobs that companies need to do.”
The company’s Series A round comes at a time when AI is playing an increasing role in pitches to venture capital groups, figuring into 80% of proposals, as noted here earlier this week.
PYMNTS examined the use of AI in the construction sector last year in a conversation with Patrick Murphy, CEO of Togal.AI, whose company had just integrated with ChatGPT.
That integration, he said, lets users interact with a library of construction data as though “having a conversation in layman’s terms … asking things like, ‘What are the specs for the exterior appliances in this building?’ or ‘How many toilets are in a building this size?’ It’s just like two people talking.”
While it sounds simple, Murphy added, “silly errors” plague the construction industry daily — they aren’t intentional, but things slip through the cracks on every job. Murphy said that “generative AI can solve 75%” of the industry’s profit fade in the near future.
“With [AI] we can finally, in an efficient and affordable manner, learn from all the data that is out there and apply it to future jobs,” he said.