THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD: PLANGRID’S CEO TALKS TURNING CONSTRUCTION HIGH-TECH
ConstructionDIVE: Hallie Busta – Construction had a paper problem, and Tracy Young had a high-tech solution. Young, 31, co-founded PlanGrid in 2011 after seeing the inefficiencies around using paper plans for big projects while working in the field as a construction engineer.
Young, who now serves as the company’s CEO, and her four co-founders devised a way to put that information in the cloud, keeping track of all the details required to complete a construction project while meeting a team’s need to collaborate on the go and reducing the volume of paper waste a big project can amass.
Today, the mobile construction platform boasts tens of thousands of contractors, owners and architects among its users. The PlanGrid team has grown to around 250 people, and it has garnered $62 million in funding from groups including Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, Northgate, Founders Fund, Box, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Spectrum 28.
We talked with Young about the challenge of launching a construction tech business, what the tablet meant for the industry and what’s next for PlanGrid.