The proposal process in architecture, engineering, and construction is largely manual today. This time-consuming process involves tedious tasks such as data collection, classification, and tagging. Most teams don’t have a central location where they can instantly access all the information of past and current proposals, let alone a tool that could aggregate and then recommend content that draws from their successful past proposals and highlights their core strengths. This is why we’re excited to share our recent investment in Joist AI. Joist AI not only serves as a central repository of knowledge for AEC; it also uses AI to automate the proposal process, drafting language that marketing teams can use to create proposals in a fraction of the time.
The current proposal process relies on rummaging through data to find past proposals and collateral and leaning on the experience of senior team members with the institutional knowledge required to complete a proposal. Data, where it exists, is often strewn across several locations, including file servers, shared folders, and legacy ERP software solutions. As a result, teams often have to scramble for information or start from scratch rather than conveniently pull from a central “source of truth.” In addition to this, RFPs may have cumbersome requirements and proposals are often completed without sufficient collaboration. This leaves significant room for error, as information is siloed with teams who were a part of past projects.
With Joist AI, AEC firms are able to maintain efficient marketing teams and still increase output. Joist AI allows their marketing team to do more of what they enjoy and spend less time starting from a blank page. A recent report from Mckinsey calls out that to meet the global demand for the $13 trillion construction industry, companies will need to increase productivity with the same number of people per project—or even fewer. The average marketing employee at an ENR 400 firm with 1,000 or more employees costs over $120,000 fully burdened. Joist AI helps customers win 10-15% more proposals without adding to their marketing team’s headcount.
Founder Rohan Jawali developed the idea for Joist AI while working for 12 years in the construction industry at large organizations and running into the limitations of incumbent proposal software. Frustrated by the time it took him to collect, classify, and aggregate data for proposals, he decided to build a solution for this persistent pain point. Joist AI solves for this by creating a contextual knowledge graph.
The Joist AI platform helps building owners and AEC professionals access historic company and project data instantly with its contextual knowledge graph creation.
The contextual knowledge graph ingests existing proposals and boilerplate copy to build a company’s “forever brain,” enabling content production and analytics. Joist AI can then be used throughout a proposal’s lifecycle, from its AI-powered RFP/RFQ ingestion to running analytics on draft proposals for readability and strategic alignment to managing your company’s content library. With these capabilities, our team at Building Ventures sees a clear path for Joist AI to fully automate the proposal and content production process, eventually becoming a complete system of record that replaces data management platforms.
Joist AI helped save Woodard & Curran 30-40% of their time per proposal. And in addition to this, the team at Woodard & Curran also found Joist AI helped them in three other key ways:
- They were able to retrieve specific resume versions for proposals helping the marketing team with resume development and management.
- Joist AI helped team members speak cross-functionally and across departments. This enabled new workflows and communication across the organization with the marketing team.
- Onboarding new members to the organization was made much easier with Joist AI’s central and secure knowledge graph which aligned with the organization’s cybersecurity standards.
These features are each a part of Joist AI’s broader mission, which is to become a central source of truth for revenue operations teams, not simply a proposal automation tool, but a central system of record for document storage, proposal drafting, and win/loss tracking.
When we spoke with members of our Innovators Network, the BVIN, we heard repeatedly that Joist AI provided their organization immense utility right away, quickly becoming an essential tool that they couldn’t imagine life without. One of our Innovation Network members, a large general contractor, was the first to put Joist AI on our radar and let us know how much value their marketing team was seeing in using its AI features. The immediate value that Joist AI delivers is a testament to the product and its design being built from the ground up for the AEC industry.
The Building Ventures team has been connected to Rohan for a while, and he has assembled a talented and deeply experienced team from the industry to build Joist AI. The leadership at Joist AI includes Chief Revenue Officer Anton Marinovich. Anton comes from Holobuilder, where he took the company from $350k to over $4M in ARR, and growth scale construction technology companies where he has grown the revenue of several mid-stage startups to the growth stage. In total now, Joist AI has 21 employees—and plans to expand the team with this new round of funding.
The Joist team at work, including, from left to right, Account Executive Kyle Faria, Founder and CEO Rohan Jawali, Head of Marketing Amanda Seele, and Chief Revenue Officer Anton Marinovich.
At Building Ventures, we seek to enable a better built world where efficiency can drive productivity and allow people to do the parts of their jobs where they are best applied. Joist AI unlocks the potential and creativity of teams through cross-functional collaboration and the automation of time-intensive tasks and helps firms grow and win more impactful projects. We are excited to have nurtured and grown our relationship with Joist AI over the past year and invested in their first institutional round of financing. We have already seen their growth in the short time we’ve been partners, as they recently crossed significant revenue milestones, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds.
For all of these reasons, we are thrilled to co-lead the $4 million Series Seed along with our friends at SignalFire, with participation from Diverge. I will be a board observer, and I know the entire Building Ventures team looks forward to working with the Joist AI team as they use these funds to build the definitive revenue operations platform for AEC #forabetterbuiltworld.
Learn more about Joist AI here.
