Jake Olsen

The Engineer Who Went Upriver

Jake Olsen had a perfectly good career ahead of him as a structural engineer. Load paths, seismic calculations, the satisfaction of a building that stays up. Then he looked at how the industry around him was actually operating - the spreadsheets, the manual handoffs, the paper-thin margins on $10M fabrication jobs - and decided the structure wasn't the problem. The workflow was.

That insight has compounded into a 20-year run of founding and scaling construction technology companies, most recently as CEO of Stratus, a Larkspur, Colorado-based platform that helps MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) contractors run digital workflows from BIM design through fabrication shop to field installation. In January 2025, Stratus closed a $32 million Series B round led by Radian Capital, a New York-based growth equity firm with $1 billion-plus in assets under management.

Olsen holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and a Master of Science in Structural Engineering. He is a licensed Professional Civil Engineer in California. The combination - systems thinking from industrial engineering, physical intuition from structural work - shows up in how he talks about software: not as a product to be sold but as a system to be integrated.

Before Stratus: A Founder's Trail Across Two Continents

Before landing in the CEO chair at Stratus, Olsen had already run a founder's gauntlet that most construction tech entrepreneurs haven't. He built engineering and sales companies in China and Taiwan - countries where construction supply chains operate at a pace and scale that reframes what "fast" means back in the US. He served as an R&D lead for construction products and software, then as VP of Engineering for software at a Fortune 100 power tool manufacturer.

That Fortune 100 stop was Stanley Black & Decker - and it set up his most consequential pre-Stratus chapter. Olsen co-founded DADO, a construction document search and automation startup, through an incubation run jointly by Stanley Black & Decker's innovation arm and Mach49. DADO digitized the chaotic document administration layer on construction projects - where the wrong revision of a drawing, pulled at the wrong moment, can mean expensive rework. The company was acquired by STANLEY X, the innovation division of Stanley Black & Decker, in 2022. Olsen became VP of Construction Technology at STANLEY X before departing for his next chapter.

Along the way he also built Hangerworks (which became DEWALT HangerWorks), DEWALT Design Assist, and Powercalc Anchor Design - each one a focused tool aimed at removing friction from specific construction workflows. The pattern is consistent: identify a workflow where humans are doing what software should, build the fix, ship it.

Stratus: Stitching the MEP Supply Chain Together

When Olsen joined GTP Software Inc. (which markets as Stratus) as CEO in 2023, he stepped into a company already serving MEP contractors but with the ambition to become the connective tissue across their entire operation. The platform covers three trade disciplines - piping and plumbing, sheet metal, and electrical - and integrates with Autodesk Revit and AutoCAD, the design tools already embedded in most MEP workflows.

The pitch is not complicated, but executing it is: take the BIM model, translate it into fabrication data, push that data to the shop floor, and track what happens next in real time. Stratus Flex gives field teams offline access to work packages. Stratus Works connects engineering documentation to electrical fabrication. Stratus Shift handles workforce management. Field Orderz converts field fabrication requests - the chaotic, handwritten kind - into digital orders processed in minutes rather than a full working day.

Olsen's approach to growth is not to rip and replace what contractors already use. The strategy, consistent across his public commentary, is to enhance existing workflows - to build trust before building dependency. One national contractor engaged Stratus for plumbing fabrication tracking, then expanded across piping and sheet metal divisions when the results were visible enough that leadership wanted more. That organic expansion story is the unit economics Radian Capital backed.

The Data Gap That Drives Him

Stratus published a 2025 MEP industry report cataloguing digital maturity across the contractor landscape. The findings were pointed: fewer than 30% of MEP firms track real-time productivity metrics. Most companies can tell you what they bid; far fewer can tell you what they actually made. The gap between financial visibility and operational visibility - Olsen returns to this repeatedly in his conference talks - is where Stratus is positioned to operate.

He says this not as a sales pitch but as an observable trend. MEP contracting has always been margin-thin work executed in variable field conditions. The firms now investing in digital fabrication workflows are doing it because prefab is increasingly a risk management decision, not just a labor productivity play. When steel prices spike and skilled labor tightens, the contractors who can model, fabricate, and track with precision hold a structural advantage over those who cannot.

The Builder Who Builds Everything

Olsen's personal website ends with a line that functions as an accidental mission statement: "Did I mention I love to build things!" The exclamation point is doing work there. His hobbies span mountain skiing, hiking, fishing, home renovation, squash, foosball, and what he describes as family music performances. He is married with two children and based in Alameda, California - living in the Bay Area while his company operates from Colorado.

In January 2025, the same month as the Series B close, Olsen joined the advisory board of Pelles.ai, an AI-powered platform for trade contractors. It is the kind of move that signals where he believes the industry is heading: the overlap between AI-assisted workflows and the physical reality of MEP construction is the next frontier, and he wants a seat at that table early.

He has been a regular presence on the conference circuit - MEP Innovation Conference (MCAA, NECA, SMACNA), NECA 2024 in San Diego, SMACNA Annual Convention - not as a marquee-name keynote but as a practitioner who has run shops and built software and can speak to both without flinching at the details.

The structural engineer in him never went away. He still thinks in load paths. The loads are different now - data throughput, workflow bottlenecks, fabrication throughput rates - but the methodology is the same. Identify where force concentrates, design the system to distribute it, build it right.