Vancouver entrepreneurs Ryan Fink and Ty Frackiewicz are back with a new startup and $7 million from investors to get it off the ground.
The company, called Digs, is building a software tool for residential home builders designed to streamline communication and collaboration surrounding construction. The software collects and stores all the documentation and plans needed in home building to make it easily accessible for all stakeholders.
When homes are completed, owners receive digital reports of everything that went into construction and all the details needed for maintenance.
“I felt the pain as someone building a home. Going through the process and all the decisions and collaboration is done in text and email, it gets messy fast,” said Fink.
This is Fink’s third Portland-area startup and the first that he has based in his hometown of Vancouver. Along with Frackiewicz, he co-founded gesture recognition company OnTheGo Platforms, which sold in 2015. Fink then went on to start augmented reality startup Streem, which Frackiewicz later joined, and sold it in 2019 to Frontdoor Inc. (Nasdaq: FTDR).
Fink stayed on at Streem/Frontdoor until April 2022. By December, he and Frackiewicz were building out the team for Digs.
“The building process isn’t broken. People have been building homes for hundreds of years. It can be enhanced, especially with advancements in tech and AI,” said Fink. “I’m a homeowner that went through the build process. Ty is a former home builder. Could we apply our AI and computer vision expertise to make it easier.”
The company employs 22 people and maintains an office in downtown Vancouver. Much of the team has worked together before either at OnTheGo or Streem. Before joining Fink to build Digs, Frackiewicz was a principal product manager at Amazon Pay. Frackiewicz also spent an early portion of his career in custom home building in Montana.
The Digs team has worked with beta customers, with that list exceeding 25 home builders. This week it opened its beta to anyone. The company doesn’t plan to start charging customers until the end of this year, Fink said.
At this point, Digs is targeting small to medium-sized home builders, including firms that build 1,500 homes a year and those that build one of two custom homes a year. Eventually, he hopes to enlist bigger developers that build spec homes, with Digs handing off info to homeowners digitally, as opposed to the physical documents commonly used today.
“Existing software for builders focuses primarily on the builder experience and neglects the homeowner experience.” said Frackiewicz in a written statement. “Digs allows builders to provide the best homeowner experience, even after the home is built.”
The company is backed by a $7 million seed round. Investors include Fuse, Flying Fish Partners, Betaworks Ventures, Legacy Capital Ventures, Portland Seed Fund and GFR Fund.
"The home has been left behind while the rest of the world is being digitized. The Digs team came to us with a vision of digitizing and bringing collaboration and automation to the place where people spend most of their time, their digs (homes),” said Brendan Wales, founder partner at Fuse in a written statement. “That’s a big vision, and one we feel strongly needs to exist in the world."
