When the pandemic caused delays across the construction industry, SmartPM Technologies Inc. founder Michael Pink decided to shift his focus away from sales.
It wasn’t that SmartPM’s product couldn’t help construction companies. The Atlanta startup provides software that analyzes construction project timelines and pinpoints areas of possible inefficiency. That capability could help construction projects stay on track despite Covid-19-related disruptions.
But Pink took a different approach. Instead of advertising the product, SmartPM put out advice on how to manage through the pandemic in white papers, giving a strategic road map to get companies back in gear.
“We did that a lot early on in Covid,” Pink said. “That sort of took a life of its own. It was really good and built a lot of trust.”
Demand for SmartPM boomed in 2020. The startup tripled its sales revenue and raised a $500,000 seed round in early February.
With the funding, Pink plans to hire five more employees. The 15-person team will expand the company's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, recommending solutions to construction managers after analyzing the data. The capabilities will be based on SmartPM's analysis of various construction projects.
“This is unprecedented," Pink said.
In 2021, Pink aims to again triple SmartPM’s growth and then look at soliciting institutional investments. SmartPM currently has about 30 angel investors and about $3 million in funding.
Pink founded SmartPM in 2016 after graduating from Georgia Tech and working in the construction industry. Fascinated by algorithms, Pink said he saw inefficiencies in the industry that could be solved using data analytics.
To start the company, he manually analyzed construction projects to make sure they stayed on track. Pink later hired developers to build a software to scale that capability, which launched in 2019.
The software uses the timeline of the construction project to create insights to minimize delays, which makes the project more cost efficient.
Pink said he expects the pandemic will cause problems in the construction industry for years. All the delays, such as supply chain issues or people on the project getting sick, cost money to the owners and contractors.
“It’s difficult to quantify and difficult to associate with someone who’s responsible,” Pink said. “So there’s going to be people arguing over money on a grand scale in this industry.”
With SmartPM, the company can reconstruct a project and figure out where the delays were, but it can also prevent those problems from happening in the first place by providing real-time data about performance.
