Pictured in photo: From left to right, Nate Miller, S. Somasegar, Brian Saab & Amy Hutchins.

Welcome Unearth to Madrona!

It is always a happy occasion to welcome a family member back into the household.

With Madrona’s investment in Unearth Technologies, we are excited to be working again with Brian Saab (CEO/Co-Founder) who we had previously worked with as the co-founder of buuteeq (a former Madrona portfolio company that was acquired by Booking Holdings, formerly Priceline). Brian co-founded Unearth with two other buuteeq & Booking Holdings employees, Amy Hutchins, Chief Product Officer and Nate Miller, Chief Design Officer. buuteeq spurred a lot of entrepreneurial spirit as we have also backed Pixvana – started by another co-founder of buuteeq, Forest Key.

Brian went back to his family roots as he began thinking of his next company. Brian grew up in a multigenerational construction company – a business he, as a technology executive, noticed hadn’t really changed that much despite cloud technologies, aerial imagery, and the plethora of tablets and laptops. He and his co-founders did some field testing and realized they could change that with their skills.

The construction industry has long been plagued by both low digitization and low productivity from its workforce. A $1.5T annual industry in the US alone and a $10T opportunity globally, the construction industry is projected to keep growing as new infrastructure is required to keep up with the global economy.

Because of the low productivity, the construction industry suffers from large amounts of waste and lost opportunity. For example, 98% of construction projects face cost overruns or delays with the average project delayed by 20 months and 80% more expensive than planned. In the US, this waste equates to approximately $500B lost per year. This is especially evident in large commercial and civic projects that require large teams and extensive communication between the field and office. This is the problem that Unearth is tackling.

Unearth has built a cloud-native collaboration and communication platform, called OnePlace, for construction and architecture teams to track the progress of their projects in real time. By giving all parties (including project owners and project managers) access to the Unearth platform, everyone is informed every step of the way of the progress of the construction. OnePlace is specifically built to seamlessly handle different data types aerial imagery, 360 images, traditional pictures, plans, and surveys.These are all integrated into the software platform which creates one view available to both office and field teams. After a year in beta and in use on major civic construction projects, OnePlace is open today for sign up at www.unearthlabs.com.

The construction industry is at an inflection point of digitization and software adoption and Unearth is well-positioned to provide a compelling solution for its customers.

Please join me in welcoming Brian, Amy, Nate and the Unearth team to the Madrona family.