built-environment
(4)Aren
Aren is a New York-based AI company that helps owners of bridges, tunnels, and other large civil infrastructure figure out what is quietly falling apart before it becomes a headline. Its platform ingests source-agnostic data - smartphone photos, drone video, laser scans, infrared, and sensors - and turns it into 3D digital twins that detect and quantify damage, track deterioration over time, and produce maintenance and capital-allocation plans. Founded by structural engineer Ali Khaloo out of Cornell Tech, Aren pairs computer vision and deep learning with decades of structural mechanics to give asset owners a quantitative, repeatable way to decide where to spend limited repair dollars.
Hantz Févry
Hantz Févry is the founder and CEO of Geolava, a San Francisco spatial-intelligence startup that turns satellite, LiDAR, aerial, street-level and government data into searchable answers about buildings and infrastructure. A Haitian immigrant who built an earthquake early-warning system at age 20, he went on to lead AI research for Google Assistant's hotword (a team that became part of DeepMind), then founded the gig-economy mapping company Stoovo - which mapped 130 million U.S. buildings and was acquired in 2024. In July 2025 he raised a $4.3M seed round for Geolava, betting that spatial intelligence will reshape real estate and infrastructure.
Jeffrey Sprau
Jeffrey Sprau is the CEO of Legence, the building-performance platform that went public on Nasdaq (LGN) in September 2025. An industrial engineer by training, he runs a 6,300-person operation that designs, builds, and tunes the mechanical guts of the buildings most people never think about - data centers, hospitals, semiconductor fabs - with the explicit goal of cutting their carbon and energy use.
David Marks
David Marks is the founder, President, and CEO of TEECOM, a California-based technology design and engineering firm he built from a one-man operation into a 200+ person global consultancy over nearly three decades. Starting at the Moscone Convention Center expansion in San Francisco, he has since shaped the technology infrastructure of hospitals, Fortune 500 offices, universities, and civic institutions across the U.S., EMEA, and APAC. A licensed Professional Engineer with credentials in communications distribution, design technology, and LEED, Marks is known for his belief that buildings should work as hard as the people inside them - and that the best technology is the kind you never notice.