While most venture money chased apps and ad clicks, a small Atlanta firm went looking for founders willing to fix concrete, steel and 3D-printed homes. Here is how Shadow Ventures built a thesis around the industry software forgot.
Two lifelong construction-tech investors raised $148 million, then handed their startups something rarer than money - a rolodex of the general contractors, builders, and design firms who become their first customers.
After years spent proving that a robot can print a neighborhood, ICON is putting its construction system in other builders' hands. The harder test starts now: turning spectacular machinery into ordinary infrastructure.
Toggle Robotics is a New York-based construction-technology company that applies industrial robots, computer vision and software to the pre-assembly and inspection of steel reinforcement (rebar) and other fabricated parts. Founded in 2016 by Daniel Blank and Ian Cohen, Toggle built a full-stack system - robotic hardware plus its Toggle OS software - that turns construction drawings into automated manufacturing programs, cutting labor cost and lifting output on civil infrastructure, energy and high-rise projects. The company has since extended into inline quality control with Toggle QC, which scans fabricated parts on the production line to confirm critical features before parts ship.
Verustruct is a New Haven-based construction-technology company building a gantry-less 3D printing system to make affordable, sustainable housing at scale. Founded by former SpaceX engineer Nick Callegari, its patent-pending translational slipform printer extrudes load-bearing walls with embedded mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, then scales itself up layer by layer, sidestepping the bulky gantry frames that cap the size of most additive-construction projects. Organized as a public benefit corporation, Verustruct aims to cut home construction cost by roughly half and emissions by around 40 percent.
Dusty Robotics builds the FieldPrinter, an autonomous mobile robot that prints full-scale building layouts directly onto construction floors from BIM models. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, it replaces a painstaking, error-prone manual chalk-and-tape process used by general contractors to mark where every wall, conduit, and bolt must land.
Canvas builds worker-operated robots that finish drywall on commercial construction sites. Its flagship machine, the 1200CX, sprays and sands joint compound to Level 4 and 5 finishes in roughly two days instead of five, has finished close to a million square feet to date, and was acquired in 2025 by JLG Industries (an Oshkosh Corporation company) to scale across interior construction.