A Starbucks on every block downtown, a Chick-fil-A by the school, an EV charger at the grocery store. These aren’t random conveniences—they’re the result of meticulously planned construction projects by brands who aren’t necessarily experts in construction or real estate development.
Scaling a physical footprint is critical for companies in industries like retail, QSR, and EV charging. These industries thrive on delivering repeatable construction projects, where every store, restaurant, or charging station follows a precise playbook to optimize for speed and minimize risk. Behind the scenes, the process is a mess: site approvals dragged out for months, endless checklists, human coordination errors, and manual workflows stuck in the past.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Surfaice, the first startup using Agentic AI to transform highly repeatable, construction projects. They automate the burdensome process of site approval to remove the largest bottleneck to scale for QSR, retail, and EV charging stations.
They chose repeatable construction for several reasons. Companies building simple construction objects at scale create structured data sets like playbooks, checklists, and standard designs. While AI is maturing, AEC industry data remains fragmented and unstructured. AI built on unstructured data has a higher probability of mistakes, which can be very costly in engineering and construction.
When we saw a demo of Surfaice’s platform in action—AI agents managing Gantt charts, making automatic RFI calls, updating schedules, and even automating contractor qualification and bidding—we were convinced. Surfaice is fundamentally rethinking how repeatable construction projects are managed, eliminating bottlenecks that have slowed the industry for decades.
The last real innovation to occur in project management was the move to software and mobile, most notably captured by Procore and Plangrid. Agentic AI is the next technology wave that will transform project management.
With any step function change, however, there is resistance to change and risk. One customer recently expressed concern about AI agents potentially generating inaccurate results, requiring human verification all the time. Surfaice is addressing this by focusing on industries with structured data and building human-in-the-loop multi-agent systems based on companies playbooks. Steps that can't be automated accurately will continue to be automated with human-in-the-loop verification.
Behind this bold vision is an extraordinary team. Alim Uderbekov, Slava Solonitsyn (founder of Mighty Buildings), and Omar Zhan bring unparalleled expertise in construction marketplaces, prefab systems, and scalable project management. Their collective experience positions Surfaice to lead the charge in transforming how the built environment scales.
The era of repeatable, AI-powered construction has arrived, and Surfaice is leading the way. We’re excited to partner with them.
