Partnering With Gryps To Bring RPA, CV and AI to the Construction Industry

Construction companies and real estate owners have hundreds of thousands of documents stored in diverse software silos. Projects like the Javits Center’s expansion for a staggering 1.2 million square feet convert to more than 20,000 documents and 100,000 data points. Working with such a large amount of data in siloed systems, costs projects millions of dollars in integration expenses and months of staff time.

Here at LDV Capital, we invest in people who are building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis.

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When we met Gryps, we immediately recognized their deep domain knowledge – together the cofounders have 25 years of experience deploying technologies across the construction industry. It was immediately clear the huge impact their solution will have on the antiquated and paper-heavy construction sector.

Gryps platform delivers enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) leveraging computer vision and machine learning to the construction industry. With Gryps, what used to be a sea of unlabeled and difficult-to-sort-through documents is now easily searchable, saving property owners and managers time.

The company was founded in 2020 and they are working with several initial customers including the Javits Center, healthcare owners and real estate developers in New York City.

*Photos: Courtesy Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office*

**Dareen Salama & Amir Tasbihi, founders of Gryps. Photo: Robert Wright**

Gryps announced today that they raised $1.5M led by us – LDV Capital – with participation from PearVC, the Harvard Business School Graduate Syndicate, and a group of angel investors experienced in building enterprise software. Among them are the Antevy brothers who are experts in building software for the construction industry as co-founders of e-Builder.

We invest in people at LDV Capital and that is the main reason we invested in Dareen Salama and Amir Tasbihi. They are both construction veterans who know the ins and outs of the industry. They started Gryps to provide a product with a frictionless user experience and to create an environment in which project managers are empowered to make better decisions in real-time and increase ROI for their projects.

“I grew up in Egypt and my co-founder Amir grew up in Iran. We both dreamed about working on historic projects in the new digital age. Once we started working, our dreams were crushed by an amazing industry, often labeled as one of the least digitized”, said Dareen Salama, Co-Founder and CEO of Gryps, in her keynote presentation at our 7th annual LDV Vision Summit. “The industry is extremely document-centric. These documents are scattered across systems, and people with big dreams are stuck doing boring tasks that stifle their creativity and stagnate productivity”.

Inefficient work processes are not the only problem in construction. According to the 2018 Emerson white paper, “Operational Readiness: Bridging the Gap between Construction and Operations of New Capital Assets”, 30% of information generated during design and construction is lost by the time a project reaches closeout [a handover from construction into the facilities management]. This leads to major construction delays and even accidents.

In 1995, the Newark International Airport was crippled, then shut down, and air travel in the Eastern United States was seriously disrupted after a construction crew driving piles for a new garage accidentally crushed high-voltage underground electrical cables serving the airport's three passenger terminals. This happened because the contractor didn't have access to the right information at the right time.

In 2015, construction work at LaGuardia Airport knocked out power and forced Delta to cancel 168 flights, causing lengthy delays. The reason was the same so maybe it’s time to change that?

This enterprise product consists of three components:

Gryps Ingest – utilizes robotic process automation technology and existing APIs to access information and data from different systems;
Gryps Understand – uses computer vision and machine learning to create data by labeling different documents and extracting information from them;
Gryps Deliver – provides the user with access to the documents and information in a digestible format.

“Using our proprietary Gryps Ingest platform on one of our pilots at a large private development, we ingested 100,000 documents and 2.5 million data points providing faster access to information about the building than there ever was before, ” says Dareen.

Launched amid the global pandemic, Gryps has experienced an increase in interest from large enterprises from around the country. The need to work remotely and access contracts, financials and other documentation as fast as possible forces companies to digitize their processes and turn to more robust tools.

Gryps is looking for brilliant people to join their team - check out their open engineering positions.

Updated on December 14, 2023: Gryps has secured $6.2 million in Seed funding, led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from previous investors LDV Capital and PearVC.

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