CONXAI, the first No Code AI Platform for the AEC industry, has raised €2.7m ($3m) in a pre-seed funding round co-led by Earlybird and Pi Labs, Europe’s most active proptech VC. Other investors in the round include A/O PropTech and Argonautic Ventures.  The funding enables CONXAI to onboard new talents, scale adoption and broaden the platform’s capabilities.

The Munich-based start-up is led by CEO Sharique Husain, a successful entrepreneur who previously co-founded an AI start-up, Dive, as well as worked at Accenture Digital, and CTO Dr. Muralikrishna Sridhar, former Program Head of Autonomous AI (autonomous driving) at Continental AG and who earlier worked as a Post-Doc AI Researcher at DARPA. The company is founded on the premise that a big part of the productivity problem in the construction industry can be solved by adopting a more “data-driven operations” approach.

The construction industry is awash in data; however, much of that remains under-utilised, e.g. an estimated 90% of the data generated during construction remains unused and up to 30% of the project data is lost by project closeout, resulting in massive knowledge loss. Fragmentation of data and knowledge processing aggravate this problem by creating information silos. The effective and timely use of data can unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in new economic value. AI holds the key, but the conventional AI approaches are limited in applicability, scalability and affordability.

CONXAI is building its platform with advanced 3rd generation “Explainable AI (XAI)” that uses transactional, sensor and historical project data, and different forms of knowledge to generate descriptive and prescriptive insights, tackling multiple use cases within construction at once, without the need to handcraft a new point solution for each new use case.

CONXAI’s No-Code play offers far-reaching potential even for non-tech users to configure and scale AI-powered analytics solutions in HSE, Logistics and Quality, much faster and at a fraction of the cost of conventional approaches. 

Sharique Husain, CEO of CONXAI, said: “CONXAI will make it easier for the AEC industry stakeholders to integrate and contextualize different types & formats of project lifecycle data, and transform them into actionable & reusable knowledge to make more informed decisions, faster. Use cases would be far-reaching, from enhanced jobsites visibility to delivering actionable insights for decision support and, in future, enabling autonomy in machinery & robotics.

“Our mission is to turn the huge volume of under-utilised AEC data into trillions of dollars in new economic value, cut wastes and create a safer & more sustainable future for the industry.

“We see a fast-growing demand of data innovation in the AEC industry. This pre-seed funding will enable us to capitalise on this demand and grow our team to deliver on our ambitious plan.”

Faisal Butt, CEO and Founder of Pi Labs, said: “At Pi Labs, we support talent and promising startups that are tackling really challenging problems within the real estate and construction sectors.  The timing of CONXAI’s proposition is ideal, with the digital transformation of the construction industry being accelerated as a result of the pandemic.

“CONXAI’s team has unique expertise in applying no code AI to deliver true data-driven operations within the construction sector at scale, delivering a huge range of benefits.  This, coupled with the scale of CONXAI’s market potential, is a really attractive to us and we are delighted to be co-leading their pre-seed round and support their global growth journey.”

Since launch, CONXAI has been piloting its solutions successfully in Germany and the USA, and has also entered into strategic partnerships with some of the leading IoT and edge-computing providers.

Michael Schmitt, Partner at Earlybird UNI-X, said: "We see tremendous appetite in the construction space for Deep Tech solutions. Given traditionally lengthy sales cycles, now is the time to use game changing technology for impact. CONXAI is in the perfect position to do so. The founders Sharique and Krishna have a compelling product vision facilitating a multitude of use cases to improve aspects like efficiency, compliance, safety and reporting on modern construction sites. Their no-code explainable AI approach allows for customization that meets different customer needs without sacrificing product scalability."