civil-engineering
(31)
Before the concrete: VSCE’s other construction work
A bus depot needs somewhere to park the buses. It also needs a closed street, a public hearing, and people who can keep the paperwork moving. Oakland’s VSCE has made a business of connecting those jobs.
VILOR builds the way back
From a flood-wrecked station in Paiporta to the tunnels beneath Seville, the Valencia contractor has made public infrastructure its business. Its next challenge reaches from recycled asphalt to the security of construction data.
Cannon makes the places we take for granted work
A flooded street, an aging pier, a launch facility: Cannon builds its business around the engineering details that make places usable. After 50 years, the interesting story is still in the work.
Hersh Saluja Built E2 One Practical Problem at a Time
He started as E2’s only engineer in 1988. Nearly four decades later, the firm had become an 800-plus-person infrastructure business - and its founder was learning how to hand the controls forward without walking away.
Ardalan Khosrowpour Is Turning the Jobsite Camera Roll Into a Construction Ledger
He grew up around construction, trained an engineer's eye on its oldest information problem, and built OnsiteIQ around a stubborn idea: if every project is captured consistently, pictures can become evidence.
Michael Vellano Built a Company Around the Streets Nobody Wants to Dig Up
A fourth-generation waterworks operator turned a century of family know-how into a modern playbook: repair what lies beneath cities, buy capabilities with care, and let field crews improve the technology.
Steve Zeets Measures the Ground From the Sky
A rodman learned to fly, an FAA webpage blinked, and an Iowa surveyor built a career around one stubborn question: can drone data be trusted on the ground?
The Company Under Canada’s Roofs Is Turning Membranes Into a Climate Data Business
SOPREMA spent decades making the layers nobody sees. Now the Drummondville manufacturer is making those layers legible - with local factories, trained installers, carbon data and a growing stack of services around the building envelope.
Whirrx Learned the Hard Part of Drone Surveying Isn’t Flying - It’s Earning the Engineer’s Trust
The Cedar Rapids company stopped selling the magic of flight and started selling what happens after landing: checked data, usable files and accuracy a surveyor can defend.
Core States Group Built a Quiet Machine for Making 1,000 Construction Projects Feel Like One
The West Chester firm turned the least glamorous part of construction - coordinating dozens of disciplines across hundreds of sites - into a growth engine for Fortune 500 clients. Its next test is whether $210 million of patient capital can scale that playbook without sanding off the local expertise that makes it work.
Claire Wilson Saw the Payment Problem Hiding Inside the Skyline
The civil engineer who once managed pieces of Hudson Yards now runs Siteline, turning the paperwork behind commercial construction into a clearer path to getting paid.
The Billion-Dollar Infrastructure Problem Vortex Fixes Without Digging Up the Street
Vortex built a one-roof business around an unglamorous civic bargain: renew the pipe, keep the city moving. Its mix of materials, machines, monitoring and field crews shows how infrastructure work is becoming a systems business.
Bentley Systems
Five brothers, one CAD engine, and four decades later the software running underneath much of the world's roads, rail, and water networks - now being rebuilt around digital twins and infrastructure AI.
Tom Yeshurun
Tom Yeshurun is the co-founder and CEO of Civ Robotics, a San Francisco construction-technology company building autonomous robots that automate land surveying and site layout. A civil engineer by training who managed a $100 million road project in Israel before founding the company, Yeshurun watched surveyors spend millions marking coordinates by hand in desert heat and set out to automate the task. Civ Robotics' CivDot robots now stake out survey points with roughly 8-millimeter accuracy and mark up to 3,000 points a day, and its technology has been deployed on solar projects representing more than 20 gigawatts of capacity. In July 2025 the company raised a $7.5 million Series A led by AlleyCorp.
4M Analytics
4M Analytics is an AI-powered utility mapping company that compiles millions of scattered public utility records, satellite imagery, and legacy blueprints into a single continuously updated digital map of what lies above and below ground. Its Utility AI Platform gives civil engineers, contractors, and departments of transportation instant, verifiable subsurface data to plan safer, faster infrastructure projects and avoid costly excavation strikes.
OptiRTC (Opti)
Opti (OptiRTC, Inc.) is a Boston-area software company that makes stormwater infrastructure smart. Its cloud platform - built around a technique it calls Continuous Monitoring and Adaptive Control (CMAC) - links sensors, valves, and weather forecasts to actively move water in ponds, tanks, and detention systems before, during, and after storms. Spun out of engineering consultancy Geosyntec in 2014 and acquired by global infrastructure firm Aliaxis in 2022, Opti helps cities, utilities, developers, and engineers cut flooding, reduce combined-sewer overflows, and improve water quality with existing infrastructure rather than costly new construction.
Itzik Malka
Itzik Malka is the co-founder and CEO of 4M Analytics, an Austin- and Israel-based company building what he calls the Google Maps of the underground. Drawing on a decade in an elite Israeli combat-engineering unit clearing buried explosives, he now leads a 130-person team that fuses AI, satellite imagery and public utility records to map the hidden network of pipes, cables and conduits beneath America before crews dig. 4M has raised roughly $119 million to date, including a Series C, and counts firms like AECOM and Stantec and multiple state DOTs among its customers.
Computers and Structures, Inc.
Computers and Structures, Inc. (CSI) is a Walnut Creek, California software company founded in 1975 that builds the analysis and design tools structural and earthquake engineers use to model buildings, bridges, dams, stadiums and towers. Its finite-element products - SAP2000, ETABS, CSiBridge, SAFE, PERFORM-3D and CSiCOL - are used by engineers in more than 160 countries and have helped shape landmark structures including the Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101 and One World Trade Center. Founded and still led by structural engineer Ashraf Habibullah, CSI grew out of the SAP and ETABS research programs developed at UC Berkeley.
Richard Fifita
Richard Fifita is the co-founder and CEO of Veyor, a cloud-based logistics scheduling platform for construction and large-scale facilities. A former civil engineer and Lendlease superintendent who helped deliver the Barangaroo International Towers in Sydney, he started Veyor in 2018 to fix the chaos he saw on his own jobsites and has since relocated to the United States to lead the company through its Series A expansion.
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.
CivilGrid
CivilGrid is a San Francisco construction-intelligence company that centralizes utility, environmental, geotechnical and land-rights data into a single collaborative platform - often called 'Google Maps for pre-construction.' Founded in 2021 by Wharton classmates Josh Mackanic and Brandon Cohen, it partners with utilities and agencies to pull current GIS datasets so engineers and construction teams can scope, plan and de-risk projects before anyone breaks ground, cutting pre-construction research time by up to 90%.
Ari Baranian
Ari Baranian is the co-founder and CEO of Pirros (YC W23), a Los Angeles startup building a detail management platform for architects and structural engineers. A structural engineer turned software builder, he created Pirros to solve a problem he lived daily at his old firm: engineers constantly recreating the same construction details from scratch. Pirros integrates with Revit, automatically extracts and catalogs details with their metadata, and makes a firm's institutional knowledge searchable and reusable. The company is profitable, reached roughly $6M ARR with 300+ firms on the platform, and closed a Series A reported around $15-17M in 2025.
Matthew Shaxted
Matthew Shaxted is the founder and CEO of Parallel Works, a Chicago company that turns the headache of running heavy AI, machine learning, and simulation workloads across clouds and on-premises systems into a single control plane. A civil engineer who once wired 30 Linux desktops into a render farm to push building simulations, he met co-founder Michael Wilde at Argonne National Laboratory and spun the lab's parallel-workflow technology into a company in 2015. Bootstrapped and cash-flow positive, Parallel Works now powers hurricane risk models, cancer research, space-weather digital twins, and IL5-authorized defense workloads.
PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers)
PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers) is a San Jose-based structural and seismic engineering consultancy founded in 1990. Ranked among the largest engineering firms in Silicon Valley, PASE designs the bones of buildings that have to stay standing - hyperscale data centers for Meta and Vantage, multifamily and mixed-use communities, commercial and institutional projects, plus seismic retrofits and non-structural anchorage. With roughly 69 staff and 250+ years of combined experience across offices in California, Maryland and Croatia, the firm pairs heavy engineering rigor with a collaboration-first culture it calls 'The PASE Way.'
Jacqueline Ramos
Jacqueline Ramos is a seasoned Executive Business Administrator at Microsoft with over 25 years of experience, currently supporting the COO, CMO for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa (CEMA), and VP for Global Partner Solutions (GPS) in the EMEA region. Based in Dubai, UAE, she has built her Microsoft career from the ground up - starting as an Executive Assistant to the Gulf Services Director in 2008, rising through roles in business operations, and eventually becoming an executive-level administrator supporting some of the company's most senior regional leaders. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of San Jose-Recoletos in the Philippines and has leveraged her technical grounding alongside exceptional organizational and leadership skills to become one of Microsoft's most trusted operational connectors across its vast Middle East and global operations.
Eric Foster
Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
Jeremy Suard
Jeremy Suard is the Co-Founder and CEO of Exodigo, a Palo Alto-based deep tech company applying AI and multi-sensor fusion to solve one of infrastructure's oldest problems: accurately mapping what's underground before drilling through it. Born in France and raised partly in Israel, Suard served nearly eight years in Israeli Military Intelligence Unit 81, directing AI and signal processing R&D teams and becoming the most decorated technology major in the IDF. He co-founded Exodigo in 2021 with fellow IDF alumni Ido Gonen and Yogev Shifman, channeling classified sensor-fusion expertise into a commercial platform that scans the ground non-intrusively, locates 20-30% more utility lines than premium competitors, and has raised over $271 million in funding to date.
Ashraf Habibullah
Ashraf Habibullah is the founder, President, and CEO of Computers and Structures, Inc. (CSI), the Berkeley-based company behind ETABS and SAP2000 - structural engineering software used in 160+ countries to design buildings like Taipei 101 and One World Trade Center. A Pakistani-American engineer who once dreamed of being a rockstar, Habibullah has spent 50 years turning the structural engineering profession from slide rules to software, earning election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024. Equally passionate about ballet, photography, and the arts, he co-founded the Diablo Ballet and the Engineers' Alliance for the Arts, championing the idea that engineers need as much human skill as technical skill.
Neno Duplan
Neno Duplan is the founder and CEO of Locus Technologies, a Mountain View-based company he bootstrapped in 1997 to become one of the world's first cloud-based environmental, health, and safety (EHS) software providers. Born in Croatia and trained as a civil engineer, Duplan earned his Ph.D. at the University of Zagreb, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, and advanced management training at Stanford. He pioneered the commercial SaaS model for environmental data management - deploying the world's first such product in 1999 - and has spent nearly three decades helping governments, utilities, and corporations track, manage, and report their environmental footprints. With more than 30 technical papers published, 11,000+ active users, and a 98% customer renewal rate, Duplan has built Locus into a durable, self-funded software company at the intersection of environmental science and enterprise technology.
Victor Romero
Victor Romero is the President and CEO of Delve Underground, a specialized underground engineering firm with 350+ employees and 21 offices across North America and Australasia. A geological and geotechnical engineer with over 30 years of experience, Romero joined the firm in 1991 when it was known as McMillen Jacobs Associates, rose through leadership roles spanning design, construction management, and regional management, and led the company's rebranding to Delve Underground in 2023. He is an industry-recognized expert in the Sequential Excavation Method (SEM) and has overseen landmark tunneling projects across the US, Australia, and New Zealand.