Briq Raises $3.025 Million to Predict Outcomes in the Construction Industry

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., February 25, 2019 (Newswire.com) - ​Briq, a Santa Barbara-based construction technology company, announces the close of a $3.025 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from MetaProp NYC and MState.

Briq (formerly Brickschain) is a data intelligence and machine learning platform that allows builders and asset managers to make better strategic decisions around the building process. This includes knowing which projects are more likely to be successful, where demand for new projects is highest and how to better connect and automate workflows and data silos.

The company uses private and public data to detect environmental, economic and market landscape changes that impact business environments in construction and real estate, and produces solutions to react to them.

Briq’s proprietary technology uses data in three distinct workflows:

• It applies neural networks, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to improve decision-making and provide business intelligence (Synapse).
• It uses intelligent process automation (IPA) and API layers to power automation and data integration between data silos (Chronicle)
• It captures and warehouses enterprise data in an immutable ledger (Foundry)

The company is led by two longtime friends, both with prolific success stories. Ron Goldshmidt comes in as an experienced leader from Wall Street where he built quantitative-based trading businesses for dozens of global emerging markets, while Bassem Hamdy forged the path for today’s construction software landscape.

“Bassem built and helped run the most successful construction software businesses in the world. It is rare and humbling to have an opportunity to help build a company from the ground up with an industry legend,” says Tim Young, founding general partner at Eniac Ventures. “The technology Bassem and his team are building will do something the industry has never seen before: break down data silos to leverage information in real time. Bassem has built and run the most successful construction software businesses in the world, and his knowledge of the construction space and the data space is second to none.”

The company has already implemented its tools with nearly a dozen clients, including Webcor, a major contractor on the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco, California. “The unification of immutability and machine learning will give Webcor the ability to drive sophisticated data analytics for our core business,” says Kim Bates, the company’s chief information officer. “For the first time in the industry, we’ve moved beyond reports – Briq’s technology helps us to understand what will happen, not what already has.”

“Construction and infrastructure are integral to society, but the decision-making process behind how, when, where and why we build is no longer working,” said Briq co-founder and CEO Bassem Hamdy. “We aren’t just solving a construction problem, we are solving a societal problem. If we are to meet the infrastructure needs of both the developed and developing world, we must improve our decision-making and analysis around the data we have. We are thrilled to have the support of Eniac Ventures as we enter the next phase of our journey.”

About Briq

Briq is a construction technology company that uses adaptive intelligence and enterprise data to detect environmental, economic and market landscape changes in the construction and real estate industries. Its platform is powered by a proprietary technology stack that combines an immutable ledger, an intelligence process automation (IPA) and API layer, and a series of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. The Santa Barbara, California-based company was founded in 2017 by Bassem Hamdy and Ron Goldshmidt. For more information, visit www.br.iq and follow @briqhq on Twitter.

Some key figures Briq is addressing for background:

• Failure rates for construction projects are consistently high
• Projects take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled
• Large projects are up to 80 percent over budget
• 98 percent of megaprojects suffer cost overruns of more than 30 percent
• Construction has great Data Wealth (a lot of unstructured data is created), but data in construction is poorly managed and rarely strategically leveraged.

Source: Briq

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