For all the money pouring into the tech industry, there are still a lot of blue-collar industries that few founders touch. Construction is one of them.
This New Greylock-Backed App Tackles the Unsexy Industry of Construction
It may not be sexy, but it could be lucrative.
Rhumbix
That’s not stopping new company Rhumbix, which built an app for the boots on the ground building the architecture and infrastructure of tomorrow. It launched today after raising $6 million in a round led by investment firm Greylock, which was joined by Brick & Mortar Ventures, UJ Ventures and Ray Levitt, a professor at Stanford.
Rhumbix gives construction workers a way to clock in on the job, using geofencing to confirm they’ve arrived at the project site. It also lets them track how long they spend on certain tasks, which sends updates to project managers who can plan accordingly. Previously, workers would provide this information via pen and paper or at a shared desktop computer, an annoying task at the end of a work day.
Eventually, the company intends to use machine learning to predict how long certain projects will take.
Its founders, Drew DeWalt and Zach Scheel, met while studying business at Stanford. They’re U.S. Navy vets with experience running civil infrastructure projects and saw the need for mobile timekeeping for construction workers firsthand.
Blue-collar industries are traditionally not quite as enthralling for entrepreneurs and investors as consumer services or even IT and enterprise technology. Yet Rhumbix was able to raise from a top firm like Greylock, known for its early bets in LinkedIn, Facebook and Workday among others, because it’s going after an open, nearly untouched field.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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