The brain behind construction: Trunk Tools’ AI-native platform is bringing real-time field intelli-gence to jobsites

Construction represents one of the largest markets in the world, but walk onto a typical jobsite and you’ll see a paradox: workers building billion-dollar assets and critical infrastructure while managing operations with clipboards, text threads, and whiteboard schedules. Communication is fragmented, documentation is scattered, and most decisions still rely on memory.

These problems are only exacerbated by the shrinking labor pool and razor-thin margins most general contractors (GCs)—who oversee and manage the building projects—operate on today. Project delays, cost overruns, safety violations, and labor shortages are escalating across the industry. Communication breakdowns and missed protocols often result in real financial and human costs, causing project backlogs and costing millions of dollars in rework.

The problem is large and obvious, so the industry has seen waves of technology aimed at digitizing and automating pieces of field operations. Yet these tools have largely delivered only incremental improvements and contributed to point solution fatigue. The status quo is dozens of apps that don’t talk to each other, and project-level information that is scattered across multiple platforms. As a result, finding the answer to a singular question on the jobsite can take up to an hour.

Enter Trunk Tools – an AI-native platform for construction field workflows, designed to sit across these fragmented systems and offer workflows such as Q&A, spec review, scheduling, and compliance. Armed with context on high-level project goals as well as day-to-day tasks, Trunk Tools serves as the single source of field intelligence for superintendents, PMs, and safety teams — surfacing insights, flagging gaps, and resolving documentation issues in seconds.

The system speaks the language of the jobsite, having been trained on the actual documents that define construction (i.e., RFIs, punch lists, drawings, submittals, safety logs, schedules). By leveraging the latest AI capabilities, it can expertly pull structured insights from the mountains of unstructured documentation that makes up a project – the key to unlocking exponential value in construction. Unlike retrofitted legacy tools, Trunk Tools is able to reason with project-specific context, understand complex construction syntax, and proactively identify issues before they become million-dollar mistakes.

The tangible results speak for themselves. We heard from customers:

• “We had a 40x ROI when factoring in labor savings and rework prevention.” – ENR 400 GC
• “You’re reducing 50% of internal labor hours on projects, which could account for 0.5% of the total project.” – ENR 400 GC
• “This helped us avoid a good portion of the $80-100M fee erosion due to rework we see every year.” – ENR 400 GC

We first met CEO Dr. Sarah Buchner several years ago and were immediately struck by her rare combination of deep industry experience and technical expertise. With a PhD in AI in Construction/Data Science, and having worked on construction sites since she was 12, Sarah has lived the pains firsthand while also deeply understanding the technical requirements needed to bring a scalable and usable solution to the field. Since then, she’s built a world-class team of AI researchers, product builders, and construction veterans who are relentlessly focused on solving the problems that matter most to field teams.

It’s clear to us that Sarah and the Trunk Tools team are well positioned to lead the next generation of construction AI. They bring deep empathy for the end user, a technical foundation built to scale, and a relentless focus on outcomes that matter at the jobsite.

We’re thrilled to lead Trunk Tools’ $40M Series B, with participation from Redpoint and Innovation Endeavors. The future of the construction site is smarter, faster, and more connected, and Trunk Tools is helping pave the way.