What Our Series A Funding Announcement Means for Join

I’m proud to announce that Join has raised $16 Million in Series A funding, led by SignalFire along with participation from Building Ventures, Ironspring Ventures, MetaProp, and Standard Investments. Before we discuss what this means for our company today, I would like to discuss why we started Join.

Join back in the day

We have come a long way since we started Join in 2017. The founding team, including me, Drew and Jim, all met through Flux Factory, a Google X-spinout. We were all aligned around a conviction that technology could enable better decisions shaping the built environment. 

For the first two years we focused all our time on continuing to learn about the construction market, listening to our customers, and getting quality feedback on development. We believe that this made the difference early on in how we grew as a team and the priority we continue to place on the voice of the customer as a company. We heard a lot of stories as we honed in on core questions of how projects went through early stages of planning, and all of the stories revolved around the challenges of connecting the right information from the right stakeholder to the point of decision. This helped us develop our vision of a world where teams are powered by trust and buildings are built with confidence.

The Value of Join

In the construction industry communication and processes are disjointed across project stakeholders – from General Contractors and Owners, to Architects, Design Teams and Engineers. Collaboration enables us to drive better decisions that are more efficient and effective for all stakeholders.

Currently, there are good systems for tracking and controlling project execution. However, these systems don’t give visibility into the earlier “preconstruction” phases; which have become more critical with the industry shift to collaborative methods where 80% of work is delivered. This early phase – where all the profitability and risk lie – is currently managed across various stakeholders in ad-hoc spreadsheets prone to human-error, outdated info and data integrity concerns.

Jesse Devitte, General Partner and cofounder of Building Ventures, put it best when he said, “In all construction projects, the window to get things right before the cost and compromise of changes escalates dramatically is short – threading that needle has been a significant and expensive challenge for too long. Join’s decision-making platform addresses this critical part of the workflow, offering all stakeholders much needed collaboration and transparency with real-time updates.”

Join is the first company developed for this collaborative way of building to help solve this industry-wide problem. We combine real-time data, decision history and actionable info in one easy-to-use platform. By providing this real-time visibility for all decision-making stakeholders, Join helps mitigate risk, ensure accountability, and promote trust. Giving all stakeholders more confidence that they have implemented best practices in decision-making and proactively address potential warning signs of project risks.

New Funding Helps Achieve Join Mission

The Join mission is to empower better decisions through collaboration. Our latest funding helps us achieve this goal by further expanding our market, supporting Enterprise customer growth, and investing in our product and the value it delivers to all project stakeholders.

Our customer’s success is the reason why Join has been so successful. We had experienced 5x growth last year due to our fast-growing customer-base. This not only includes some of the largest firms in construction, such as Clark Construction, DPR Construction, and McCarthy Building Companies, but also midsize and smaller firms who are embracing and excelling in collaborative delivery modes.

The Join platform makes it easier for our customers to navigate Target Value Delivery (TVD) projects – ranging from $2 Million to $2 Billion – for healthcare facilities, research centers, affordable housing, and entertainment and sports complexes. Ilya Kirnos, Founding Partner and Chief Technology Officer of SignalFire said, “These collaborative approaches require contractor input earlier in the process. Join is the only platform on the market designed to support collaborative decision-making, and its rapid adoption is a testament to its effectiveness.” We talk to more and more companies who have found their business shift to rely on these collaborative modes of delivery, especially in the last 12 months.

One customer, DPR Construction, implemented Join for a TVD project for a $650 Million healthcare complex. Melanie Moreschi, a Preconstruction Manager at DPR Construction, stated, “Join has helped my current project simplify what used to be a time consuming, multi-step process. Any time we’re working with an owner, particularly on a TVD job, there are numerous requests for the current job value during preconstruction. With Join, we have been providing that information instantaneously.”

Other interesting projects leveraging the Join decision-making platform include getting a children’s hospital project back on track during the Covid pandemic, developing a clean and safe water infrastructure, and bringing one of the first Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) sustainable projects to the San Francisco Bay Area.

As I reflect on all the successes Join has had thus far, I want to thank our customers, supporters, and the overall Join team for believing in our vision. You make this funding milestone possible!

Thank you,

Andrew Zukoski

CEO and cofounder of Join