Kanav
Hasija

The Planner
Behind the Plans

Picture this: a civil engineer walks onto a $500M hospital project and realizes the structural clash could have been caught six months earlier, from a laptop, with the right data. That moment - or something close to it - lives inside every product decision Kanav Hasija makes at MeltPlan. He is not building software for construction workers. He is building intelligence for the people who decide what gets built before anything gets built.

Hasija arrived at this problem the long way around. He graduated from IIT Kharagpur - India's most competitive engineering school - and then, counterintuitively, pivoted to patent law at the University of New Hampshire. That detour mattered. Patent law trains you to read systems for hidden assumptions, to find the thing that seems settled but isn't. It's a strange credential for a construction AI CEO, and also a perfect one.

Innovaccer: The $3.2B Warm-Up Act

In 2014, Hasija co-founded Innovaccer with college friends Abhinav Shashank and Sandeep Gupta. The thesis was simple and correct: healthcare data was a disaster. Clinics, insurers, and hospitals all held fragments of the same patient record, and no one could see the full picture. Innovaccer built the data infrastructure to connect those fragments - and eventually became a $3.2 billion company doing it.

For eleven years, Hasija served as Chief Product Officer, translating the abstract problem of "fragmented healthcare data" into products that clinicians actually used. He built a habit of looking for industries where information chaos was disguised as operational normalcy - where everyone assumed the dysfunction was just part of the job.

Construction was hiding the same disorder.

Reading the Blueprint Differently

The construction industry loses an estimated $177 billion annually to inefficiencies, most of them traceable not to bad execution on the jobsite, but to bad decisions made during preconstruction - the phase before ground breaks, when architects, contractors, and owners are still negotiating between what's desirable, what's buildable, and what's legal.

In 2025, Hasija co-founded MeltPlan with two people who understood both sides of that gap. Tanmaya Kala, Co-Founder and COO, spent 13 years as a Project Executive at DPR Construction - one of the most respected construction firms in the US - overseeing projects including Lucille Packard Children's Hospital and multi-billion-dollar complexes in Cupertino, California. Prithviraj Damodaran, CTO, brought deep AI research experience. The founding team is not a group of technologists who discovered construction. It's a technologist and a practitioner who found each other at the right moment.

What MeltPlan Actually Does

MeltPlan's core premise is that preconstruction is a system, not a phase. When contractors bid, when architects draw, when owners approve - all of those decisions carry implicit assumptions about building codes, costs, and timelines. When those assumptions are wrong, the correction happens downstream: during construction, when corrections cost ten times what they would have cost earlier.

MeltPlan has two flagship products. Melt Code is an AI-powered building code research tool. Give it a project address and a design intent, and it returns the specific code requirements that apply - not a dump of the entire municipal code, but a step-by-step reasoning trail with citations. It scores 95% or higher on building inspector certification exams. That's not a marketing claim. It's a benchmark chosen because building inspectors are the human gatekeepers whose judgment the AI needs to replicate.

Melt Takeoff handles quantity estimation - the painstaking process of calculating exactly how much material, labor, and equipment a project requires. MeltPlan pairs AI-driven speed with human expert verification, because speed without accuracy is just fast guessing.

Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the oldest and most successful venture firms in technology, led MeltPlan's $10 million seed round in February 2026. Partner Pankaj Mitra described MeltPlan as building "a visionary planning engine layer that helps teams quantify tradeoffs early and reduce downstream volatility." The round brought total funding to $14 million, all raised within months of the company's founding.

The Boring Manifesto

There is something deliberately provocative about Hasija's stated ambition: to make construction boring. It sounds like lowered expectations. It isn't. Boring, in his framing, means predictable. It means projects that finish on time, on budget, without the 11th-hour panic that currently defines the industry's reputation. It means the drama moved upstream, into the planning room, where it can be resolved with data rather than with change orders and litigation.

The framing also contains a critique of how construction technology has typically worked. Most construction software is built to manage chaos - project management tools that track problems after they occur, communication platforms that organize the fallout from bad decisions. MeltPlan is betting on a different intervention point: eliminate the source of the problems, not the paperwork that documents them.

Hasija is 35 people into a company that is barely a year old, backed by one of Silicon Valley's most rigorous investors, operating in an industry worth $2 trillion globally. He has done this before - built something from almost nothing, watched it grow past all reasonable projections, and then handed it off to a team mature enough to run it without him. The construction industry, unlike healthcare, has not had its data-infrastructure moment yet. Kanav Hasija is making the case that it is about to.