Profile · The Founder Issue
Jose Cruz Jr.
The pizza-shop kid from Florida who decided every building on earth deserves an honest floor plan - and then built the lasers to prove it.
The pizza-shop kid from Florida who decided every building on earth deserves an honest floor plan - and then built the lasers to prove it.
Reporting: public interviews, PBS feature, UF College of Design profile, and the company's own dispatches.
On any given Tuesday in midtown Manhattan, somewhere on West 35th Street, a small crew at Integrated Projects is processing a point cloud of a hospital in Singapore, a warehouse in Sao Paulo, and a residential tower on the Upper East Side. The crew is forty-five people. The buildings, all told, now number more than seven thousand. The man running it answers email between his daughter's bedtime and a podcast taping.
Jose Cruz Jr. is the founder and CEO of Integrated Projects, known to its customers as IPX. The pitch is one sentence: bring buildings online. The execution is harder. IPX dispatches trained technicians with 3D laser scanners, captures a building in millimeter-grade detail, then runs the resulting point cloud through a proprietary engine called BIMIT that converts raw geometry into standardized BIM and CAD as-built files. The result is a building that a software can actually read.
Owners and operators - hospitals, REITs, hyperscalers, school districts - buy this because they have discovered an uncomfortable truth. The drawings in their facilities folder are wrong. Wings were demolished. Riser diagrams lie. The wall the architect drew in 1978 is six inches off, and that six inches is the difference between an MRI machine fitting through the door or not.
Cruz figured this out a decade ago, working construction in New York with a Master of Architecture from Columbia and a hard hat from OSHA. He went looking for the floor plan. The floor plan was a fiction. So he built a company to tell the truth about buildings.
The company has scanned 52 million square feet. It operates across six of the seven continents. It runs on roughly six conversions a day. It is also, in the founder's own framing, a family business with global ambitions.
A startup that quietly stacked square footage while nobody was watching.
The company is a member of NVIDIA Inception. Internally it runs on AWS, Vercel, Webflow, Hubspot, Slack, Intercom, Segment, Hotjar, Cloudflare, and an Autodesk BIM Collaborate seat where the rubber meets the wall section. The two flagship services are SCANIT, the field capture, and BIMIT, the modeling engine. One sends people out with lasers. The other turns the lasers into furniture you can click.
"Seeing customers use your service and come back ten, twenty, thirty times over - that's really validating."— Jose Cruz Jr.
A short list of teenage interests that, in retrospect, was a business plan.
The parents ran a pizza shop in Florida. Puerto Rican, small-business, register-in-the-front, dough-in-the-back. Cruz worked there. He absorbed the unglamorous calculus of margins, suppliers, walk-ins, and what to do when the lunch rush ends and the lights stay on.
In high school he built custom webpages on the side. He also resold sneakers, back when that was a hustle rather than a hedge fund. A family friend who happened to be an architect noticed the kid and started teaching him AutoCAD. The pizza shop sold pies. The kid learned to draw walls.
He applied to the University of Florida. He did not get in. Two years of community college followed. He transferred to UF's College of Design, Construction and Planning, where he edited the student publication Architrave, served as president of the Studio Culture Committee, and graduated near the top of his class in 2012. Then Columbia took him for the Master of Architecture, which he finished in 2014. NYU later handed him a post-professional certificate in real estate finance, because the man does not, evidently, like to leave a credential on the table.
The first jobs were the marquee ones any architecture kid would frame: Robert A.M. Stern, AECOM Tishman, UA Builders Group, SLAB Architects, ArchDaily. He drew. He built. He noticed something while building. The drawings did not match the buildings. Not approximately. Not metaphorically. Literally.
In 2018 he started Integrated Projects and hired his younger brother as employee number one. He taught him to scan. The two of them, in a manner not entirely unlike running a pizza shop, started taking orders.
Truth, mostly. Accurate as-built BIM and CAD documents derived from 3D laser scans. Hospitals, towers, industrial buildings, retail boxes, residences. If it has a roof, IPX will scan it.
Spatial intelligence. The catalogue version: SCANIT for field capture, BIMIT for the conversion engine, IPX as the platform owners log into when they want to see their building as a file.
Because manual scan-to-BIM is slow, expensive, and frequently wrong. IPX has automated enough of the pipeline that customers come back 10, 20, 30 times. The flywheel is repeat orders.
His younger brother. Taught him scanning. Built the company together. Treats it as a family operation that happens to have global customers and venture funding.
Per his own essays and posts: digital mapping, robotics infrastructure, 3D printing, venture capital, deep tech, real estate, private equity. He writes occasionally on Medium under @joselgcruz.
Buildings 2.0, a podcast he records under the IPX banner, interviewing the architects, operators, and AI engineers building the next layer of real estate.
From a Florida pizza counter to a Manhattan loft full of point clouds.
Designs custom websites. Resells sneakers. Learns AutoCAD from a family-friend architect.
Two years at community college after an initial UF rejection.
Transfers to UF. Edits Architrave, leads the Studio Culture Committee, graduates near the top of the class.
Master of Architecture at Columbia University in the City of New York.
Architect and construction manager at RAMSA, AECOM Tishman, UA Builders Group, SLAB Architects, ArchDaily.
Founds Integrated Projects in New York. Hires his younger brother as employee one. Teaches him to scan.
Earns NYC Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) certification.
Closes a $3M seed round. PBS profiles the company in a documentary on real estate's digital future.
Launches Buildings 2.0 podcast, hosted from inside the company.
~45 employees. 7,000+ buildings. 52M sq ft. Six continents. Six buildings converted a day.
"Be in the moment and kind of appreciate where you're at."— Advice to architecture students, UF College of Design profile
Not just a software founder. Cruz holds the OSHA-30 construction safety credential. He is allowed on the site he is selling software into.
Native Spanish and English. Useful when the building you're scanning is in San Juan or São Paulo.
Has volunteered as a graduate student mentor at Columbia since 2016 - paying back the M.Arch one cohort at a time.
Former program director for ACE Mentor, the architecture-construction-engineering pipeline for high schoolers.
IPX has digitized buildings on six of the seven continents. Antarctica, presumably, is a sales lead.
Employee one was family. The pizza-shop model: keep it close, train the next person in line, let them grow with you.
The internet indexed the web. Search engines indexed the web. AI is now reading the web. Buildings, weirdly, sat out. The asset class that swallows roughly a third of household income still relies on PDFs of drawings that were last updated when the lobby had a payphone.
Cruz's ambition is to fix that at the species level. Make every building searchable. Make every wall a record. Make every renovation a delta on a file rather than a fresh round of guessing. If IPX wins, the floor plan stops being fiction.
Profiles, dispatches, and the podcast.