Co-founder and CEO of AI Clearing. Runs the Austin company that watches infrastructure builds from the air and tells the general contractor, in almost-real time, whether the pipeline, the wind farm, or the highway is actually where the schedule says it is.
AI Clearing sells a boring, valuable product. You give it drone imagery from your job site, the BIM design, the construction schedule, and some ground data. It gives you back an answer: what got built this week, by whom, and whether it matches the plan. The interesting thing is not what the platform does. It is who is willing to pay for it. As of 2024 the list included Vinci, Skanska, Kajima, Ferrovial, and EllisDon - five of the twenty largest infrastructure firms on earth. In October 2023 the company closed a $14 million Series A led by Prudence, with FJ Labs joining existing backers Tera Ventures, Inovo and Innovation Nest. Total disclosed funding sits around $18.26 million. Mazur says revenue grew fifteen-fold in the year before the round.
Mazur's company is unusual mostly because construction is unusual. Every large infrastructure job is a bespoke industrial process producing an unrepeatable object, subject to weather, subcontractor disputes, materials shortages, environmental review, and the whims of whoever signs the change orders. It generates enormous amounts of data and almost no auditable record. The industry runs on trust and clipboards, and both are expensive. What AI Clearing is really selling, underneath the computer vision, is an audit trail. The pitch to a director of construction is not that the software will make her team smarter. It is that when the litigation comes - and it always comes - the drone imagery, tagged and time-stamped, will be there.
Mazur has been building some version of this for nine years. In 2015 he was a partner at PwC. He and Adam Wisniewski, his co-founder from the first day of business school at SGH Warsaw, had convinced the firm to give them roughly $2 million to launch a global Drone Powered Solutions competency center. The unit did advisory work for major infrastructure clients, using drone-captured data to size up sites and estimate progress. It worked. It also had a ceiling. Consulting revenue is linear. Software revenue compounds. The two spent much of the late 2010s trying to spin the idea into a product inside PwC, then trying to spin it out.
They almost didn't. According to a 2024 Forbes Poland profile, the founders had a planned investor lined up when the pandemic hit. The investor vanished. Mazur and Wisniewski left their corporate positions anyway, worked without a salary for months, and ran the company from Wisniewski's home. The origin story that ended up on the pitch deck - beach walk on the Hel peninsula in 2015, decision to build the company, five-year gap, pandemic launch - reads better in the abstract than it lived at the time. The first meaningful check came from angel investors, roughly $100,000. A $2 million seed followed from Tera, Inovo, and Innovation Nest. Then, in the middle of the pandemic, a general contractor called PCL agreed to try the product on a Canadian solar farm.
The PCL job is the one Mazur tells. A subcontractor claimed to have completed work that the drone imagery said had not been done. The platform caught it. The customer stayed. Every construction AI company has a version of this story, but Mazur's has a particular tidiness to it, because it is exactly the use case that justifies the price tag. A single caught anomaly on a large infrastructure project can pay for the platform many times over. Every subsequent conversation with a major contractor starts from the same premise.
The current company is one hundred and twenty people, headquartered on Chevy Chase Drive in Austin, with a customer footprint across the United States, Canada, Western Europe, the Middle East and India. The technology stack is not exotic. Drones fly the site. Imagery is stitched into geospatial ground truth. The system compares that ground truth to the design and the schedule, tags what is there and flags what shouldn't be. The company publishes a set of numbers on its home page that are, taken together, an unusual portrait of a startup: 251,036 developer hours invested, 36,382,032 objects tagged, coverage equivalent to 45 Paris-areas. These are the kind of statistics an engineering firm publishes, not a SaaS company. That is probably not an accident.
Mazur is also, and this matters more than it should, a Polish founder running an American company. He grew up in Poland, took a master's in finance at SGH Warsaw in 2002, spent several years at Orange as a transformation projects manager and then change director, joined PwC in 2007, and picked up a Global Executive MBA from INSEAD in 2017. His first company was a student venture called Wpadnij.com in 2001. He is a co-author on multiple US and European patents in AI-based construction oversight. The parts of his biography that read as unusual for a founder - the decade at a Big Four firm, the executive MBA, the middle-management jobs at a telco - are the parts that seem to explain the company he built. AI Clearing does not sell to developers. It sells to procurement teams at multinational contractors. Those buyers do not respond to velocity. They respond to certifications, references, and a founder who returns their calls.
Which brings us to the ISO 42001 certification. In 2024 AI Clearing became one of the first construction platforms to hold the SGS-issued AI/ML certification. This is not the sort of thing a growth-stage startup usually spends time on. Mazur understood something early: in an industry that lives on liability, a compliance stamp is not a marketing asset. It is the reason the deal closes. Everything about the company - the industrial statistics on the homepage, the customer list of century-old contractors, the Austin address, the Warsaw engineering team, the quiet Series A - fits together only when you assume the customer is a risk manager, not an innovator.
In 2015 we went to Hel, walked along the beach, and decided we wanted to do this. — Michael Mazur, to Forbes Poland (translated)
Series A investors: Prudence (lead), FJ Labs, Tera Ventures, Inovo, Innovation Nest. Jordan Viniar of Prudence joined the board.
"This funding round positions us to capitalize on the digital transformation of construction project management."
"In the past 12 months, we have achieved 15x revenue growth."
"An investor who has demonstrated a deep understanding of both our technology and industry, and who shares our vision of becoming the category leader in autonomous project control."
The caveat: Mazur is not a founder who does television. His public statements are almost entirely functional - funding announcements, conference keynotes, LinkedIn updates about customer wins. The interesting quotes are in the Polish-language press, where he talks about the founding in more human terms.
Solar farms, wind. The category where the first big PCL deal happened. Also where the anomalies tend to be visible from the air.
The segment Mazur has singled out publicly. He has spoken at IPLOCA's Europe Regional Meeting on adoption across pipeline builders and operators.
Linear infrastructure. Long thin sites. Ideal for drone flights. Also ideal for schedule disputes.
The unglamorous but essential category. Substations, corridors, easements.
Earthworks, grading, foundations. The stuff nobody photographs and everyone argues about later.
Increasingly relevant. A single hyperscaler site can be the size of a small town.
The decision to build AI Clearing was made on the Hel peninsula in 2015. It took five years and a pandemic before it actually happened.
Before PwC, before Orange, there was Wpadnij.com. A student venture from 2001. He was 22.
Mazur is listed as co-inventor on multiple US and European patent applications in AI-based construction oversight.
Both founders worked without pay for months in 2020 after their planned investor withdrew because of COVID-19.
Vinci, Skanska, Kajima, Ferrovial, EllisDon, PCL, baywa-re, Energy Project Solutions. Not a startup Rolodex.
AI Clearing holds ISO 42001 AI/ML certification from SGS - unusual for a growth-stage construction platform.
Co-founder and CEO of AI Clearing, an Austin-based AI platform for autonomous construction progress tracking and quality control.
A decade at PwC, where he made partner and ran the firm's global Drone Powered Solutions competency center. Earlier: Orange, then Wpadnij.com.
Around $18.26M in total disclosed funding, including a $14M Series A led by Prudence in October 2023.
Master in Finance from SGH Warsaw School of Economics (2002). Global Executive MBA from INSEAD (2017).
Major infrastructure and construction firms: PCL, Vinci, Skanska, Kajima, Ferrovial, EllisDon and others.