Chaitanya N K and the trouble with a finished-looking building

A building has an awkward habit of looking finished before it is. Walls go up, ceilings close, and the remaining work becomes harder to see. In one example Chaitanya N K gives, a subcontractor claimed completion while four sprinkler heads were still missing. Track3D, the company he co-founded, helped show where they belonged. Four is a small number. Once the ceiling is closed, it can become a remarkably expensive number.

NK, as he introduces himself, has spent years teaching computers to interpret physical spaces. The route has included gesture-controlled wearables, augmented reality and digital replicas of cities. Construction gave that experience a particularly stubborn assignment: establish what happened on the ground while someone still has time to do something about it.

The story is also about an engineer changing his question. Early on, he enjoyed asking what a technology could do. At Track3D, he has had to learn what a superintendent needs to know. The distance between those questions contains much of his education as a founder.

When a city asked a smaller question

Before Track3D, NK and his collaborators worked on digital twins of cities. They used technologies including drones and robots to reproduce physical places digitally. That brought them into contact with construction, because a city is continually acquiring new pieces of itself. The people responsible for those places wanted help monitoring what was happening on their projects.

The request narrowed the problem beautifully. A virtual city is an impressive object. A reliable account of yesterday’s installation work is something a project team can use before lunch. In NK’s telling, the move into construction grew from that encounter between the team’s technical experience and a customer’s practical question.

His May 2025 account traces a career already stretching back about 17 years. He had explored furniture augmented reality and devices capable of controlling drones. The recurring interest was the relationship between the physical world and its digital representation. Construction supplied a setting in which the quality of that representation could affect the next day’s work.

For an outsider, the surprise was how much observation still had to pass through a person before it became a progress figure. Someone walked, assessed, recorded and reported. NK found a place where computer vision might remove some of that repeated effort.

A gadget looking for a reason

NK is unusually frank about the appeal of his earlier experiments. He and Vineeth had built gesture-controlled smartwatches that could control drones and robots. Why? “Now don’t ask us why,” he jokes. They enjoyed making the technology work. Anyone who has ever spent a weekend improving an already adequate gadget will understand the temptation.

His own explanation of the lesson is less indulgent. Technical enthusiasm needed a customer problem. At Track3D, that meant leaving the abstract discussion and going to the place where people were trying to get a building completed. He describes shadowing teams and asking questions, rather than expecting a theoretical understanding of construction to be enough.

The distinction matters in reading his career. The earlier projects were part of a long apprenticeship in sensing, interpreting and interacting with the world. Construction demanded another skill alongside those: knowing which piece of information was worth producing for someone else.

There is a little comedy in the change of scale. A watch that controls a drone sounds like a future worth demonstrating at a party. Confirming how much ductwork is installed sounds like the sort of conversation that ends one. On a working site, however, the second answer has an audience with a deadline.

Three founders, several beginnings

Track3D’s founding story begins well before its incorporation. NK says he, Kiran Gutta and Vineeth Kumar Paruchuri have known one another for more than 20 years. He and Vineeth have worked together across startups for roughly 15 years. The company brought an existing relationship into a new market.

The company was founded as ConstructN in January 2022. Its published milestones place the first US pilot in March 2023, a US product launch that July, and the change of name to Track3D in August 2024. Those dates describe the current business. The accumulated technical experience belongs to a longer story.

By September 2024, the business had announced a $4.3 million seed round led by Endiya Partners, with Shadow Ventures and Monta Vista Capital participating. The platform gathered visual material from several kinds of capture equipment into one place. The ambition was to make the material useful for understanding construction progress.

A longtime collaborator offers a kind of continuity that a product name cannot. Markets change, companies change, and a technical direction may become useful somewhere its inventors did not expect. In NK’s account, the team’s shared history carried across those changes.

The Friday meeting matters

Construction offered no exemption from learning the customer’s habits. Hensel Phelps began a pilot with Track3D in Denver in 2023. Thai Nguyen, the innovation leader at the contractor’s Diverge organization, describes an early team of eight employees being exposed to projects and regions so it could learn what people actually needed.

The relationship expanded through pilots in different places. Nguyen recalls Friday meetings in which the teams discussed what had happened during the week: was a problem caused by the software, by how it was used, or by something that needed to change? That is a less cinematic founding scene than the sudden revelation. It is also easier to imagine producing useful software.

For NK, the approach fits a wider respect for field teams. In his public writing, he notices the everyday adjustments people make to keep a project moving. His descriptions dwell on ownership, care and the standards workers hold themselves to. Those observations help explain why he treats the site as a place to learn.

The requirement is demanding. People already have responsibilities, existing processes and a day's work to complete. A tool has to earn a place among them. The Friday meeting makes that requirement concrete: bring back what failed, discuss it with the people affected, and improve the next version.

The arithmetic at the airport

At San Francisco International Airport, Track3D was used on Hensel Phelps’ approximately $300 million Courtyard 3 Connector project, an office and operations center between active terminals. The reported results included 2,964 hours of manual coordination eliminated, $342,000 in labor savings and three major reworks avoided.

These figures describe that project. Their importance to NK’s story lies partly in what followed: in March 2026, Track3D announced a multi-year Hensel Phelps agreement covering more than 200 active projects. A successful use had become the basis for a much wider commitment.

The company’s financing had also moved forward. In September 2025, Track3D announced a $10 million Series A led by Ironspring Ventures with co-lead Zacua Ventures. It put total announced funding at $14.3 million and said more than 400 projects had already run on the platform.

For an engineer, the output of a system can be a measurement or a reconstruction. For the CEO, another output matters: whether an organization returns and expands its use. The Hensel Phelps relationship links those two tests. The software has to help with a real task, and the company has to keep supporting the people doing it.

Charging for an answer

In October 2026, Track3D made the argument visible in its commercial model. Contractors would pay for progress tracking, with eligible visual documentation included at no additional cost. The announced price was $0.15 per square foot per project. Progress data could be available in as fast as six hours after capture.

“Everybody on a jobsite has pictures. Almost nobody has answers.”

Chaitanya NK · October 2026

The wording describes the product’s task neatly. A picture is evidence waiting for a question. Organizing it helps someone find it. Measuring work within it gives the project team another way to understand what has changed. Track3D’s new offer put that analysis at the center of the bill.

The company says it works from standard two-dimensional drawings and uses a building information model when available. The six-hour figure is its advertised fastest turnaround. The practical attraction is the possibility of using the previous day’s capture before the next day has got very far.

A building has a life after the ribbon

NK’s longer ambition extends beyond construction progress. He describes Track3D becoming an operating system for physical assets across their lifecycle, connecting the knowledge of what exists with other information about how an asset is built and used. It is an ambition, with construction monitoring as the starting point.

His continuing interest in robotics belongs within that picture. Better cameras, more accessible capture equipment and improvements in AI give the founding team new options for understanding physical places. His experience explains why he watches those developments closely. The jobsite experience explains the question he now brings to them: what useful work will this make possible?

The four missing sprinkler heads offer an appropriately modest ending to a story full of ambitious technology. A building can absorb a great deal of money and still leave someone asking whether a small piece of work is complete. NK has found a business in taking that question seriously. The answer needs to arrive while the ceiling is still open.