Winners of Construction Start Up Competition 2024 unveiled

The final of the Construction Start Up Competition was held in Las Vegas, US

The competition, being held for the eighth time, concluded at Trimble Dimensions in Las Vegas, US, with the eight finalists each giving a five-minute pitch and then answering two questions from the judging panel.

The event is organised by Cemex Ventures in association with Caterpillar, Dysruptek by Haskell, Ferrovial, Hilti, VINCI Group’s Leonard, NOVA by Saint-Gobain, Trimble, and Zacua Ventures. These companies all made up the judging panel.

The gold winner was Austria-based Sodex Innovations, which improves surveying in construction by installing hardware such as laser scanners, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), and cameras directly on the construction machine.

This enables the machines to deliver digital twins of construction sites to a cloud solution in real time. This means the current status can be accessed quickly, reducing manual data collection and processing, saving time, and cutting costs.

The silver winner was Raise Robotics from the US. The construction robotics company produces autonomous high-precision fastening solutions for on-site construction. Raise Robotics develops advanced robotic systems that work with existing customer workflows. Their current focus is on deploying robots with contractors to handle the installation and inspection of facade brackets.

Bronze place went to US-based Trunk Tools. The startup has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform to organise mountains of unstructured data, automate workflows, and augment worker productivity. From identifying data discrepancies to tracking schedule misses, their AI agents are augmenting construction professionals’ intelligence and productivity. Their flagship agent, TrunkText, allows field workers to ask questions about their project documents, receiving answers and supporting documentation in seconds.

Since its first edition in 2017, startups from more than 80 countries have participated in the biggest challenge aimed at startups in the construction industry, the Construction Startup Competition. Many entrepreneurs have gone on to collaborate with the participating companies after applying to the Competition.