We have followed Join CEO Andrew Zukoski since his days at Flux, the first startup to graduate from Google’s moonshot factory X back in 2014. When Flux proved to be an idea ahead of its time, Andrew turned his attention to the more tangible challenge of preconstruction, asking “Why, with cost estimating and scheduling among the earliest disciplines to be transformed by technology, are construction projects persistently over budget and behind schedule?”
Andrew and his co-founders—Head of Design Drew Wolpert, and Head of Customer Success Jim Forester—determined that the root of these persistent budget and scheduling issues was in the decision-making process. Measuring the cumulative impacts of the hundreds, sometimes thousands of decisions made in preconstruction, all of which require cost, schedule and resource input from multiple stakeholders, is no small feat. Compounding the challenge, the industry moved on from legacy design-bid-build project delivery. In the age of integrated, collaborative project delivery and target value design, there are now more “downstream” stakeholders (trades, suppliers, manufacturers, regulators, tenants, and others) providing more of their specialized input, earlier than ever in the project lifecycle.
Andrew and his team started with a bunch of questions. What was the current state of the art to manage this process? How do you solicit timely input from all these stakeholders? Or visualize and assess the impacts of each decision set? Or synthesize and present all these options to the client? How do you crisply share decisions as final with the broader team? And, finally, how can you chart a project’s progress towards the client’s target cost, schedule, and value objectives? With almost no exception, the current state of the art was a fragile, complicated web of spreadsheets, meeting notes, and email.
So with conviction of the magnitude of the problem to be solved, Andrew and his team set out to build a modern SaaS platform to address this challenge. Their earliest construction, design, and owner/operator customer teams responded enthusiastically, and the Join team never looked back.
Today, just three years after our initial investment, Join is the only construction management software that supports collaborative contracts and integrated project delivery all while facilitating decision-making, trust, and transparency among stakeholders. With dozens of customers on board, many with enterprise-wide deployment, Join’s product/market fit is established. And just as importantly from a venture investor perspective, Join has also identified several vectors for future organic growth. In particular, several general contractor customers now routinely leverage Join in project pursuit, before a project has been formally awarded, as a way to engage and delight prospective customers. Helping your customers win more business—that’s a good thread to pull on.
Join is also beginning to attract new and varied stakeholders, including building product manufacturers and material suppliers keen to gain access and contribute their just-in-time input to the project’s preconstruction decision-making processes. Helping facilitate commercial transactions—another promising thread.
For all these reasons, we remain bullish on Join’s prospects and are now thrilled to announce our follow-on investment in the company’s $16 million Series A funding round led by SignalFire, with participation from Ironspring Ventures, Metaprop, and Standard Ventures. Now, this fresh infusion of capital will support the rapid growth of the SaaS construction platform. We’re excited to see what unfolds in this next chapter with Join!
Learn more about Join’s decision-making platform for construction and the Series A funding here.
