The construction industry depends on a range of legacy software and complex scheduling systems to map out project plans. Planera, a San Jose startup backed by $5.4 million in seed capital, just launched a collaborative project management solution to change that.
Since contractors are tasked with navigating high borrowing costs as well as fluctuating interest rates and material costs, it becomes more difficult to balance project planning, forecasting and bidding while adhering to timelines and margins.
Planera developed a digital platform that helps construction companies visually schedule and plan infrastructure and commercial projects. Its solution combines project completion timelines, float management, project filtering and resource usage graphs with an online whiteboard tool where the entire project team can collaborate. Its goal is to provide a more accessible alternative to legacy systems and Gantt chart scheduling tools.
“The people with the most construction experience and expertise often don’t know how to use complicated, legacy scheduling software,” Nitin Bhandari, CEO and founder of Planera, said in a statement. “Planera is so simple that anyone with job knowledge can create a resource-loaded schedule in hours instead of weeks. With multi-user collaboration similar to Google Docs, we give scheduling superpowers to everyone in the construction industry.”
The new funding from investors including Sorenson Ventures and Firebolt Ventures will help Planera fuel investments in sales and R&D, Bhandari told Built In via email. The company will work to build out automated risk analysis and alert functionality into its solution.
