Photo courtesy of LeanCon
Ziv Levi
CEO, LeanCon
Industry experience: 7 years
Age: 33
Ziv Levi’s New Haven startup uses AI to translate construction drawings into nuts-and-bolts work plans, potentially saving developers and contractors time and money in an environment where many projects face cost pressures. In December, LeanCon received a total of $6 million in seed round funding led by Ibex Investors, doubling its initial target. Another investor is Phil Bernstein, a former Autodesk executive and current deputy dean at Yale School of Architecture. The company is seeking to shrink multi-million-dollar preconstruction budgets through its AI-powered engineering software, which can generate detailed work plans in minutes rather than months, and accelerate the pace of projects after they break ground. Like the company’s chief technology officer, Sapir Tubul, Levi grew up working on job sites for his father’s construction company. The pair co-founded LeanCon in 2023.
Q: What are the inefficiencies in predevelopment that LeanCon seeks to eliminate?
A: We are using construction drawings and 3D models as inputs into our platform and we are leveraging that into providing [work] plans with the output. In 2019, in one of the projects where I was working as an engineer, I was sitting in the trailer office on-site when suddenly the chief engineering officer knocked on my door and told me, “Ziv, please stop everything you are doing. There is a new task I would like to give you. There is a new product that the company wants to start building eight months from now. The deadline is two months, and I would like you to lead this operation.”
He gave me the normal information: the building, the lot and then he told me: “You just need to find the optimal scenario that will maximize both cost and time.”
He was smiling, because he realized it was not a simple task. I dived into the process: how much time is it going to take us? As an engineer, the complexity is to understand how everything would fit together. If you change the number of cranes, or you want to complete a project by a specific day, it will impact all the other decisions. In eight months, we started building and we realized we had big issues. Today, the planning and the bidding takes a lot of time. It involves a lot of people, but it ends with uncertainty. Construction professionals base these decisions on their own experiences.
Q: What is your background in the building industry?
A: I was a structural engineer by occupation and moved to New Haven for an MBA at Yale University, and decided to engineer the problems with the projects that I had been involved with. As an engineer, I was doing vertical construction projects, both commercial and residential. Most of it was in Israel before I moved to the U.S., infrastructure such as roads and bridges.
Q: What parameters does the LeanCon program address?
A: When we started diving deeper into the entire construction process, we asked many questions of not only the general contractors, but also the banks, architects and more. We came very humbly to the process. Although both of us are civil engineers, nobody can guarantee the answers 100 percent on time: cost and how to build. It’s complete intuition and an experience-based process. We are training the algorithm on a daily basis. We involve new construction methods and this is how we make the platform smarter. We involve past projects into the platform and learn the biases and tendencies of the client.
Q: How will the latest funding round be used?
A: The target for this round was $3 million when we started. And very soon, we discovered there was demand and we decided to increase it. We are collaborating with one of the largest general contractors in the U.S., and the focus for the coming eight months is building more functionality. As one of my investors tells me, we need to be focused, but listen to noises from the outside and understand this is a business opportunity we can achieve. We are still figuring out pricing and thinking about the right approach, and we will have a clear strategy toward pricing in the coming months.
Q: How do you quantify the potential cost savings?
A: To date, we have completed several projects in Manhattan alongside our partners. In one notable case, we helped a client evaluate two different construction methods. The project had faced significant initial delays, and the team was under pressure to accelerate the timeline. By optimizing project logistics & strategy and adjusting the projected manpower, we were able to shave five weeks off the schedule, simply by making more informed decisions during the pre-construction phase. On another project with a different client, we were asked to determine the most efficient sequencing for their cast units and calculate exactly how many were required. Using our proprietary technology, we predicted various scenarios to demonstrate the impact on scheduling, logistics, labor, and heavy machinery. As a result, the client saved nearly six weeks. Essentially, we are turning pre-construction planning into a precise science.
Levi’s Five Iconic Projects He Wishes LeanCon Could Planned:
- Eiffel Tower
- The Pyramids
- Machu Picchu
- Neuschwanstein Castle
- Mont-Saint-Michel
