Scott Unger’s first contracting job involved painting a sorority house. It is a pleasingly unglamorous beginning for someone whose later work would concern the movement of information through enormous building programs. Before there were platform strategies, there were walls that needed finishing.
Today, Unger is the co-founder and CEO of Kahua. In September 2026, the company announced a minority growth investment from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities at a valuation above $1 billion. It had reached $100 million in annualized revenue. The distance between those figures and a painting job is considerable. His subject, however, has remained remarkably consistent: how people organize the business of getting something built.
A paint business with a software problem
Unger started his contracting business while at college. His degree was in computer engineering at Tulane University. That combination put him in contact with both the technical possibilities and the administrative demands of construction. He later recalled skepticism when Constructware was introduced at a contractors’ computing show.
“We were laughed at.”
Scott Unger, recalling the early reception to Constructware
At Nix-Unger Construction, where he was co-founder, president and CEO, the work included painting, wallcoverings, specialty finishes and waterproofing. He developed software to help manage planning, estimates, budgets, documents, job costs and schedules. The list reads like the contents of a contractor’s desk. Every item represents something that has to agree with something else before a job can proceed smoothly.
A background like that gives software development a rather demanding customer: the operating business itself. An elegant screen has limited charm if the estimate cannot be reconciled with the budget. Unger’s career moved toward the information surrounding construction, the records and decisions that accompany the physical work and make it accountable.
The sale that left room for a sequel
Constructware took that work onto the web. Unger was its co-founder, president and CEO. In February 2006, Autodesk announced an agreement to buy the Alpharetta company for $46 million in cash, subject to a working-capital adjustment. Autodesk wanted to extend Buzzsaw, its collaboration offering, with Constructware’s cost, bid and risk-management capabilities. The deal closed in March.
The pairing had a practical logic. Buzzsaw approached collaboration from design; Constructware had approached it from construction. Bringing them together promised a more connected route through the work. The acquisition also put Unger inside a much larger organization. He subsequently served on Autodesk’s executive team.
For a founder, a sale supplies an obvious ending to a story. In Unger’s case, it supplied an interval. He and Brian Moore co-founded Kahua in 2009. Moore remains the company’s president, while Unger guides its platform strategy and long-term direction. Their second construction-software company gave them another chance to address the category’s underlying design.
Kahua’s premise puts considerable weight on configurability. Owners, builders and partners need software that can accommodate their processes as those processes change. Unger’s current work includes the less theatrical necessities of governance, accountability and compliance. These subjects rarely improve a dinner party. They do help explain why enterprise customers might keep using a platform after the sales presentation has ended.
The school district test
The argument becomes easier to follow when it leaves the vocabulary of platforms. Consider Santa Clara Unified School District. Its move to Kahua involved more than a terabyte of information from closed and active projects. The migration had to happen while projects continued. School construction does not politely suspend itself while a database changes address.
The district needed particular forms and approval paths. Construction change directives had to accommodate the Division of the State Architect’s approval process. Change-order reporting had to support review and approval by the district’s board. Funding needed to be tracked across projects, including the appropriation and allocation of money. The implementation included modified workflows and reports to meet those requirements.
That example explains the sort of customer detail Unger’s platform thesis makes room for. A board approval is an organizational fact with consequences for how software should behave. A funding restriction has to survive its translation into a system. Configurability earns its place when the software can reflect those actual obligations.
The same concern appears at a different scale in the General Services Administration’s rollout. Kahua reported 24 integrations with 10 distinct systems and the migration of 2,400 existing projects and data sets. Such numbers describe the substantial connecting work behind an enterprise deployment. A new system has to enter an organization already full of systems.
At the time of that announcement, the GSA deployment had more than 4,000 users, with expansion toward approximately 7,500 planned. Behind a number like that are different teams needing access to the same underlying work. The deployment illustrates the organizational reach of a project-management system once it becomes part of a public institution’s daily operations.
Who keeps the building’s memory?
Unger’s construction background also gives his later emphasis on assets a useful context. A project team works toward completion. An owner inherits a building with a much longer future. The information assembled during delivery has to remain useful to people who were not present for every decision.
In 2025, Unger publicly introduced Kahua’s Asset-Centric Project Management approach. He emphasized connecting project data and supporting decisions across the asset’s lifecycle. It extends the frame beyond the construction schedule. Handover becomes part of the information problem the platform is meant to address.
One connected record across the asset lifecycle
There is a human handoff inside that technical description. The people who organize construction and the people responsible for the finished asset need continuity between their work. Unger’s attention to the entire lifecycle makes that continuity a product concern. Completion is a milestone in the building’s biography; it leaves a long stretch of ownership ahead.
His interest in the industry has also extended beyond his companies. His public professional history includes board service and chairmanship at Associated Builders and Contractors of Georgia, as well as a later board term at Atlanta Athletic Club. He has also co-founded Compliance 360, working on corporate risk and compliance. Accountability recurs across the businesses.
AI has to obey the same rules
In a January 2020 essay co-written with Sean Olcott, Unger examined the risks and opportunities of construction technology. The pair stressed how difficult abstract technical ideas can be to communicate, and how much tangible use cases matter. That is a useful lens for reading his current work. A technology’s appeal depends partly on whether someone can see a job for it.
The essay also identified obstacles to AI adoption, including weak data foundations and dependence on analog deliverables. It anticipated machine learning helping with document controls, data entry and collaboration. Read alongside Kahua’s later products, that argument makes the continuity in Unger’s thinking visible. The intelligence needs access to usable information, and the information needs to be organized in a way that supports decisions. A construction record gains value through its relationship to the process around it. Finding a document is one task; understanding where it belongs in the work requires more context.
Kahua launched Noa, an embedded AI assistant, in May 2026. Its capabilities include searching and summarizing information, retrieving records, supporting reports and assisting with project processes. Through kBuilder Canvas, users can also describe applications and workflows in natural language. The software is designed to turn those descriptions into tools inside Kahua.
Unger’s stated emphasis was the placement of that intelligence within the system where teams already collaborate. Project data, permissions and accountability remain part of the environment. The ambition is to let teams act on information without transporting the work into a disconnected tool. It is a contemporary expression of his longstanding interest in keeping the pieces together.
For federal customers, that environment comes with specific constraints. In June 2026, Kahua announced approval for AI capabilities within its FedRAMP platform boundary. Moore described the need to maintain the governance expected in federal capital programs. The partnership remains visible here: Unger sets out the platform direction, while his co-founder explains the conditions under which institutions can use it.
Unger also joined a construction-industry discussion alongside Moore and university facilities professionals, including representatives from Auburn University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The conversation considered AI readiness, connected systems and reliable data. Once again, the people responsible for buildings were in the discussion about the software.
“It reflects the trust of our customers and the strength of our team.”
Scott Unger on Kahua’s revenue milestone, September 2026
Seventeen years, then another beginning
By September 2026, Kahua reported more than 2,500 customers and over $400 billion in capital programs supported on its platform. Those are different measures of the business: organizations using the system and the value of programs it supports. Together they indicate the scale of the work behind the investment announcement.
Annualized revenue at the time of the Bain Capital investment
The company’s record also includes appearances on growth rankings: No. 375 on Deloitte’s 2025 Technology Fast 500 and No. 2,359 on the 2026 Inc. 5000. Such lists provide snapshots. The longer interval is the seventeen years between Kahua’s founding and the Bain announcement, following an earlier company and its acquisition.
Unger has described the next phase in terms of faster AI and product development, deeper customer value and investment in people. The October 2026 launch of Schedule Manager offers a concrete example of the continuing work. It connects schedules to project records, costs and workflows, making it easier to see how planned activities relate to execution.
A schedule, after all, has to remain in conversation with the job. That practical requirement links the current product to the contractor who began with estimating, budgeting and job costing. Unger’s career has changed scale several times. The unfinished business is still recognizable: keeping the record close enough to the work that people can use it.