Serial Entrepreneurs Raise $16M to solve Data Analytics for AECO
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SAN FRANCISCO – January 26, 2022 – Toric, the leading no-code business intelligence (BI) workspace for architecture, engineering, construction and owners, today announced that its commercial presence is accelerating as the result of an aggressive go-to-market strategy enabled by $10.5 million in Series A funding. Toric was co-founded by Thiago da Costa, the former CEO of Lagoa, acquired by Autodesk in 2014.
Toric raised a $5.5 million seed round in late 2019 led by Storm Ventures with key participation from angel investor and former Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass. The company operated in stealth until October 2021 when it raised a Series A round led by Gideon Hayden, Leaders Ventures with angel investors Chris Lynch, chairman of DataRobot and CEO of AtScale, along with Plangrid co-founder, Ralph Gootee. The additional funds have enabled Toric to execute its go-to-market strategy while increasing the number of data-integrations, partnerships and platform features.
“Construction firms have a growing data-integration problem. We are experiencing the explosion of SaaS solutions in the construction tech space, but companies are realizing they need to build complex infrastructure and fight with rigid data-pipelines to extract real value – the data,” said da Costa who was previously the Director of Data at Autodesk. “Right now, the data is siloed in systems, and the complexity involved in working with this information is far too large for most companies.”
Gaining insights on a single project is already very difficult, and becomes even more so, over the whole portfolio of projects. General contractors, owners and even architects need better intelligence during the different phases of construction in order to optimize their margins and offer new data products to their customers.
Like other businesses, Toric’s target customers are undergoing digital transformation as a matter of necessity. However, digital transformations fail to succeed in absence of the tools and team needed to get to the right data. Toric’s low-code/no-code solution is designed to be easy to use so anyone can leverage the data to power reporting and analytics without having to hand-code their own data solutions and reports from scratch.
“Companies that lack insights into their operations and costs are losing money that could be invested in future growth,” said Bass, a member of Toric’s board of directors. “Thiago knows how to identify underserved markets and provide them with a commercial solution that helps solve their biggest pain points. I was immediately onboard with the Toric concept, and the market validation has been fantastic. Now it’s time to focus on growth.”
What Toric Does
Toric provides data integration, data-prep and analytics in a cloud platform to boost productivity. With it, users can consolidate, prepare for analysis, visualize, share and reuse data. Platform users from different parts of the business – from IT, to design and project management – can leverage Toric to augment transparency during project execution.
For example, General Contractors can deliver more accurate bids, analyze past data and track project execution progress in real-time by using Toric to leverage data in Autodesk, Procore, AWS, Azure and other systems. The platform includes more than 30 data connectors to databases, SaaS services, CAD/BIM models, JSON and CSV files, pulling all the data is in a single place for easy access.
Toric and Procore Have Partnered
Toric and Procore announced a partnership on Jan 21st that enables project managers to manage and trust their data by combining Procore’s project management tool and Toric’s no-code data workspace. Toric unlocks data from Procore, so every data point reported in the field can be used to make data-informed decisions. They can also combine multiple sources together to enable more effective product management. The combination of the Toric and Procore solutions saves time and allows project managers to manage their product data using pre-built or customized data apps, such as the Construction Report.
It’s also easy to build and share data apps that extend to interactive dashboards, data-capture forms and more. Users simply need to create a dataflow, connect data and provide access to the data via a shareable link to the app.
“We're excited to announce our new partnership with Toric, the construction data-workspace. Use Toric to unlock data from Procore and even combine multiple data sources together for quality decision making using data—even from the field” said Doug Gibson, Partnerships at Procore. “Customers can create reports in minutes instead of days and make better quality decisions because they have better data.”
Da Costa’s Backstory
Da Costa and his co-founder, Dov Amihod, are serial entrepreneurs and this is their second act together. Their last company, Lagoa, had pioneered design and mechanical engineering on the cloud – dating back to 2011, when the Web 2.0 was just emerging. The company was acquired by Autodesk in 2014.
In 2019, before starting Toric, Da Costa founded a real estate development company and went deep into the construction process by making an unorthodox investment which was building a multifamily residential building from the ground up.
“I became increasingly curious about how the world gets built, how the digital and physical worlds intersect and the opportunities for better software,” said da Costa. “I had never been involved in a large construction project before because I was too busy investing in startups, crypto and public markets.”
One of his early lessons was that construction projects were still largely managed in spreadsheets, and the lack of access to data was hindering communication and collaboration.
“While design is fun, and Autodesk’s design tools make that process very smooth, when it got down to estimating, it was a mix of shock and awe,” said da Costa. “It didn't matter that we had a 3D design model with the latest BIM (building information management) technology available. The most advanced technology was a spreadsheet with a pivot table, so I ended up with a 30-tab spreadsheet which is too unwieldy to manage projects effectively.”
The project was completed in 18 months, six months behind schedule and 10% over budget. Ultimately da Costa discovered that almost all projects suffer cost overruns and are delivered 40% late. He also learned that construction is a $10.5 trillion industry – 16% of the global GDP – and the cost of bad data in the US is estimated at $3 trillion per year.
With better data, budgets are more precise, projects run more efficiently and it’s easier to reduce waste and increase profits. That’s what da Costa, Amihod and the rest of the Toric team have enabled.
About Toric
Toric is the leading data platform in architecture, engineering, construction and major owner/operators. Founded in 2019, Toric brings data into a single workspace where users can create automations, transformations and power real-time reports and dashboards that are easy to share and update without any coding. Toric’s all-in one, no-code data workspace provides insights across multiple data sources and allows users to build reusable dataflows which populate the reports and dashboards. Toric is on a mission to make data and business intelligence user friendly and accessible, so its customers can focus on insights instead of coding or formulas.
