project-controls
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Hassan Albalawi and the trouble with a perfect plan
A Saudi engineer started with a sensor on a construction helmet. Now Hassan Albalawi is trying to close the distance between the schedule in the office and the working day on site.
Contruent makes the budget tell the truth
A megaproject can have thousands of people and still struggle to answer one question: what will it actually cost? Contruent puts cost, schedule and change in the same conversation.
The construction site has a memory problem
Track3D turns camera walks, drone images and scans into a searchable record of what was actually built. Its bet is that a progress report should arrive while there is still time to change the work.
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.
MGAC sells the part of a building you never see
The owner’s representative turns architectural ambition into budgets, contracts and opening-day plans. Its real test comes when the drawings are beautiful and the numbers refuse to cooperate.
Xpedeon Put the Whole Construction Back Office on One Screen
Construction runs on thin margins and thick piles of paperwork. Xpedeon’s three-decade wager is that the site, the supply chain and the finance office should stop arguing from different spreadsheets.
MOCA Systems Built Software for the Moment the Schedule Lies
The MIT spinout pairs sticky-note-simple planning software with people who step into projects already sliding off the rails. Its advantage is knowing that a schedule is both data and a negotiation.
The 3-Week Fix for Mining's 10-Week Talent Problem
Peter Lucas built a 60-plus-person industrial project firm around an unglamorous promise: get the right specialist into the owner's team fast, then keep the knowledge from walking out the door.
WakeCap
WakeCap is a construction-technology company that puts a small IoT sensor into standard safety helmets to give project owners live, site-wide visibility into workforce, safety, productivity and progress. Founded in 2017 by Dr. Hassan Albalawi and Ishita Sood, the company runs a wireless mesh network that works without GPS, cellular or Wi-Fi and feeds field data into a single owner's dashboard. Its technology has been deployed across roughly $80 billion of active projects - including Aramco, NEOM, Qiddiya and King Salman Park - and has tracked more than 150 million labor hours. WakeCap raised a $28M Series A in 2025 and operates from Riyadh, Dubai and San Francisco.
Doxel
Doxel is a Menlo Park-based construction technology company that uses computer vision and AI to automatically track what is actually being built on large, complex job sites. By turning 360-degree camera footage, drone imagery and LiDAR scans into objective progress data and comparing it against the schedule, budget and BIM model, Doxel gives owners and general contractors early warning on cost and schedule risk - often described as a 'Waze for construction.' It has tracked billions of square feet of work for Fortune 500 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Shell, HCA and major data center developers.