Disperse, which brings AI-fuelled data to construction projects, raises $16M

Disperse, a U.K.-based construction tech company that offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to help project managers track work and capture data from building sites, has raised $16 million in funding. Founded out of London in 2015, Disperse effectively creates a digital version of an entire construction site, including visual snapshots that track the progress of work to help all stakeholders — regardless of where they’re based — keep up with things. For this, someone employed on the site (e.g. a project manager) walks around equipped with a standard 360° camera at regular intervals, and the resulting imagery is fed directly into the Disperse platform which processes the visuals and applies computer vision techniques to figure out what’s happening. While the trillion-dollar construction industry often gets a bad rap for its inefficiency, Disperse founder and CEO Felix Neufeld said that this has nothing to do with attitudes, more that it’s a case of insufficient access to digital technology that can really shift the needle. “We see most technology on sites quickly become either fully abandoned, or become ‘zombie software,’ which is to say that the initiatives are technically still active but are solely kept alive for perception, or contractual obligations, without fulfilling their functional purpose,” Neufeld said.