A decade in the dirt, then the corner office
Ivan Lvov runs a company that answers a question almost every homebuilder in America wrestles with: how much dirt actually moved on the site this week, whether the grade is right, and what it cost. As CEO of TraceAir Technologies since September 2025, he leads a platform that turns drone flights over construction sites into topographic data, cut and fill calculations, and progress reports that developers can act on without walking the whole property.
The appointment, announced on September 29, 2025, was less a shake-up than a continuation. Lvov had already spent roughly nine years inside TraceAir as its Chief Strategy Officer, the person responsible for figuring out which customers to chase, what they needed, and how to keep them. He succeeded co-founder Maria Khokhlova, who moved into a strategic advisory role. When he stepped up, he already knew the customers by name.
TraceAir was founded in 2015 by a team of construction and technology experts, and it built its name on a narrow, hard-to-crack promise: be the site intelligence software built specifically for homebuilders and land developers, not a generic mapping tool bent to fit them. The company handles the drone operations, the data processing, and the software - a turnkey model that lowered the barrier for an industry not known for adopting software quickly. Today its roster reads like a directory of American homebuilding: D.R. Horton, Lennar, Meritage Homes, Century Communities.
From maps to earthwork
Lvov did not arrive in construction technology by accident. Before TraceAir, he built his operating instincts at 2GIS, a digital mapping and navigation company, where he rose through franchise, regional, and commercial roles. He led the expansion of the franchise chain to 16 offices and 450 employees, a network that generated roughly one-sixth of the company's revenue. The work was, at its core, about turning messy physical geography into a data product people could use - the same instinct that later applied to measuring a graded lot from the air.
In 2015 he enrolled in the MSx program at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a one-year master's degree for mid-career leaders, joining as a Sloan/MSx Fellow. The following year he joined TraceAir as Chief Strategy Officer and, separately, co-founded WayWeHire, a venture applying simulation and machine learning to assess sales candidates. His career reads as a series of bets on turning something hard to measure - a city, a hire, a construction site - into something you can quantify.
The patient scaler
What sets Lvov's ascent apart is its pace. Startup CEOs are often parachuted in from a bigger logo to disrupt. Lvov's promotion was the opposite: an inside hire who spent nearly a decade validating the growth playbook himself before being handed the keys. In an industry as conservative as homebuilding, that patience was arguably the point. Adoption came one grading report at a time, and the trust of 17 of the top 20 US builders was earned slowly.
He now oversees a company of more than 170 people spread across the United States, Armenia, and Spain, serving nearly 300 active accounts across North America. TraceAir is backed by PeakSpan Capital and other investors, and the company marked its tenth anniversary in 2025 - the same year it changed leaders. Lvov, who is based in Austin and speaks Russian natively, has worked across Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Palo Alto, Seattle, and now Texas, a geography that mirrors the platform's own global footprint.
His stated ambition is unglamorous and specific: make data-driven earthwork the default, not the exception. For an industry where a misread grade can cost weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is a large enough problem to fill a career. Lvov has spent one at the edge of it - first in maps, now in dirt - and in 2025 he moved to the front to lead it.