She built a wellness headquarters meant to showcase the future - and found a crew printing out her emails to write back by hand. That was the day Bundle began.
Janna Colucci runs Bundle, and Bundle sells one deeply unglamorous thing: a better way to buy the stuff that buildings are made of. Drywall. Tile. Fixtures. Lumber. The thousands of individual line items that a residential builder has to source, price, order, track, and reconcile before anyone moves in. Today that job is done with spreadsheets, PDFs, and a phone pressed to someone's ear. Colucci's company turns it into software.
From an office on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, she and a team of roughly fourteen are building a procurement platform aimed squarely at small and mid-sized residential builders - the segment most software companies ignore because it is hard to sell to and harder to please. Bundle stitches a managed marketplace to project-management tooling, layers a product catalog and delivery tracking on top, and more recently added a "smart buy" feature, an AI co-pilot, and a recommendation engine trained on supplier and builder data. The promise is blunt: run purchasing at ten times the speed, and pull ten to twenty percent of cost out of every project.
That number is not a rounding error in construction. Materials are one of the largest line items in any build, and the buying process is where budgets quietly bleed. Colucci likes to cite a statistic that sounds like hyperbole until you've watched it happen: roughly 98% of construction projects finish over time and over budget. A missed delivery here, a forgotten reorder there, and a move-in date slides by weeks.
Before Bundle, Colucci was a vice president at Delos, the wellness real-estate startup that popularized the idea that buildings should be good for the humans inside them. She project-managed healthy, sustainable builds, and she was handed the build-out of the company's own New York headquarters - a space meant to be a living showcase for the highest levels of green and healthy building certification.
The showcase worked. The process behind it did not. Somewhere in the middle of chasing vendors and reconciling orders, Colucci learned that the construction team had printed out her emails and hand-written their responses on paper, rather than simply replying. It is the kind of detail that a person either laughs off or never forgets. She never forgot it.
"The construction industry operates the way it was 100 years ago," she has said, "with a lot of paper and a lot of phone calls." She could have taken that as an insult to the industry. Instead she took it as an opportunity, and she was careful about the difference.
The construction team had printed out my emails and written responses rather than emailing me back.
Plenty of founders parachute into old industries convinced everyone there is doing it wrong. Colucci's read is the opposite. "People in the construction industry are some of the greatest people I have ever met," she says. The paper and the phone calls were not evidence of people being backward. They were evidence of an industry that had never been handed decent tools.
So Bundle is pitched as a gift to builders, not a lecture. The bidding process gets simpler. The tangled web of distributors gets consolidated into something closer to a one-stop shop. The buying power of many small builders gets pooled so a two-person outfit can negotiate like a national account. It is disruption that flatters its customers instead of replacing them.
Ask Colucci about leadership and she reaches for Lao Tzu: "A leader is best when people barely know he exists; when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." For a self-described "huge extravert" who loves being in the room with people, it is a telling choice - the goal is not to be the loudest voice but the reason the team sounds good.
She credits a former boss for the practical version of the same idea. When she was promoted to senior manager, the advice was to stay "available" even while working hard, because, as she puts it, "having an amazing team around you is the secret to growth." It shows up in how she talks about Bundle: rarely as her achievement, usually as the team's.
Sources: Colucci interviews & Alumni Ventures
While much of tech chases flashier problems, Colucci has planted her flag on one of the least photogenic and most valuable: the digital supply chain of physical construction. Her running argument is that construction is sitting on a mountain of untapped data - what gets ordered, from whom, at what price, arriving when - and almost none of it is being used to make the next project smarter. Bundle's newer features are the beginning of that idea: a smart-buy engine, an AI co-pilot, and recommendations that get better as more builders buy through the platform, all reachable by API.
The company's stack reflects a founder who wants to move fast without breaking the trust of a skeptical customer - Node.js, React Native, and Phoenix under the hood, Stripe for payments, a remote-friendly team. The category she's in has a name now, ConTech, and a growing roster of investors willing to bet that the last industry to digitize is also one of the biggest. Bundle, women-led and narrowly focused, is one of the names people point to when they argue the bet is a good one.
Colucci's ambition is not to build another marketplace. It is to make the act of buying materials boring - predictable, fast, cheap, and quietly powered by data - so that builders can spend their attention on the thing they actually love, which is building. If she pulls it off, the printed-out email becomes a story she tells at conferences, and nothing more.
The construction industry operates the way it was 100 years ago - with a lot of paper and a lot of phone calls.
People in the construction industry are some of the greatest people I have ever met.
Our goal is to transform these antiquated processes, making them more efficient and affordable.
She publishes on Medium as Janna Wandzilak and appears on LinkedIn as Janna (Wandzilak) Colucci - the maiden name still travels with her.
Describes herself as "a huge extravert" who loves people and teamwork - and then quotes a philosopher about invisible leadership.
Green-building consultant, then co-creator of mindfulMATERIALS, now Bundle CEO. Her entire career orbits a single subject: building materials.
Her co-founder, Edison Ding, was a Stanford Business School classmate. The company started as a partnership, not a solo act.
A Dartmouth D'14, spotlighted on a Founder Friday by the college's Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship.
Bundle runs out of Telegraph Avenue in Oakland on a modern stack - Node.js, React Native, Phoenix - for an old-school industry.