Trunk Tools Inc., an artificial intelligence-powered platform for construction teams, today announced it has raised $40 million in fresh funding to change how project management works.

The Series B round, led by Insight Partners, also attracted participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence. The new funds bring the total funding for the company to $70 million.

Founded by Chief Executive Dr. Sarah Buchner in 2021, Trunk Tools uses advanced AI to ingest numerous construction-related documents, including drawings, specs, schedules and submittals — all of which are generated throughout the lifecycle of a project.

Buchner’s career began as a carpenter at the age of 12 in a village in Austria. She took her experience as a laborer, superintendent, project manager, group leader and eventually a Ph.D. in civil engineering to build the company.

“Construction is the backbone of our global economy and daily life, yet the industry is still bogged down by outdated tools, fragmented systems, and overwhelming bureaucracy,” said Buchner. “We built Trunk Tools to eliminate the guesswork.”

General-purpose AI can’t do that job, she explained, since the construction industry is built on proprietary data, complicated jargon and complex workflows.

Traditional tools for construction workers and project managers serve as passive digital repositories, merely providing a space to store documents for easy retrieval. In contrast, Trunk Tools functions as an active teammate by consolidating scattered documentation, identifying risks and uncovering valuable insights, according to the company.

The construction market was valued at $11.4 trillion in 2024, projected to grow to $12.3 trillion in 2025, and is expected to reach $16 trillion by 2030, according to a report from market analysis firm Next Move Strategy Consulting. Although its growth is being driven by economic expansion and rapid urbanization, the industry is being held back by challenges such as slow digitization and productivity issues.

Companies such as Trunk Tools hope to overcome these issues with the transformative power of AI. Similar firms such as Buildots Inc. and Procore Technologies Inc. have also embraced AI as part of bringing digitization to the unwieldy industry.

“Trunk Tools is helping define a new category of AI with its construction platform,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners. “Project-level information in the construction industry lives in multiple siloed systems, and accessing that data is a time-consuming and error-prone process for field teams who need it in real time.”

Trunk Tools said it will use the new funds to expand its engineering, product and go-to-market teams, and scale up its AI platform’s capabilities to handle increasingly complex projects as well as address smaller-scale edge cases.

Photo: Unsplash