Enlaye, an AI-powered construction risk management platform, has raised $5 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its predictive project risk platform, expand its AI and machine learning capabilities, and support business growth.
The funding round announced on June 10 was led by Glasswing Ventures and co-led by Link Ventures, with participation from Imad Ventures, AiSprouts, Hannah Gray Ventures and Apprentis Ventures.
Instead of reviewing documents, schedules or other individual aspects of a project, Enlaye, which was incubated at Harvard Innovation Labs, analyzes data from all aspects of a project and ranks and predicts risks such as delays or construction errors using both customer data and a matrix of similar past projects.
“Enlaye can already connect to your project’s data sources, whether it’s SharePoint, in most cases it’s still SharePoint, like Autodesk Forma. [formerly Construction Cloud]or other integrations we have,” says Philippe Rival, Enlaye’s co-founder and CEO.
Rival held various positions at Vinci Construction, eventually becoming a Project Controls Manager working on major infrastructure deliveries, such as the Jeffersonville East End Crossing between Indiana and Kentucky and the Confederation (Railway) line extension in Ottawa, Canada.
After earning an MBA from Harvard, Rival founded Enlaye to apply AI and machine learning to construction risk analysis. While contractors can already identify risks, he says AI can analyze a company’s historical project data and current risk portfolio much faster than traditional manual reviews.
Rival said geotechnical, contractual, financial and commercial risks that might require a team of up to five estimators and executives to assess can be analyzed early in a project using Enlaye’s platform, generating results in about 12 minutes once client data is provided.
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The current round of funding will allow the company to further refine the models and systems it uses to predict the risk of clients like Vinci.
“No two contractors have the same history of good past projects and bad past projects, so they all have different burn stories,” he says. “The idea of a single risk matrix doesn’t work. People want something that speaks to them, their risk appetite.”
Stamatios Liapis, chief technology officer and co-founder of Enlaye, who met Rival in high school in France and later attended Harvard with him, says the platform is designed to augment human judgment rather than replace it.
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Enlaye is the first platform created to manage risk throughout the project’s life cycle and for all the actors involved.
— Kleida Martiro, CEO, Glasswing Ventures
Risk in construction is shaped by documents, schedules, contracts, relationships and years of experience, he says. To model these interconnected factors, Enlaye uses graphical neural networks and multimodal AI.
“The main specialty they have is that they operate on graph data structures,” says Liapis.
Compare the approach to a network of connected nodes and relationships. By analyzing these connections, graph neural networks can identify anomalies and patterns that may indicate future project risks.
Enlaye is entering a growing market of AI-powered construction risk tools. Earlier this year, Trimble expanded its Document Crunch construction document review platform to broader risk management capabilities with AI.
“Risk in construction doesn’t live in any single document or phase. It escalates from bid package to contract to change order to claim, costing the global industry trillions a year in overruns, disputes and rework,” said Kleida Martiro, CEO of seed-round leader Glasswing Ventures. “Enlaye is the first platform built to manage risk throughout the project lifecycle and throughout the project.”
Rival’s former employer VINCI Group has supported Enlaye through Leonard, Vinci’s innovation and prospecting platform, through its seed and Catalyst programs. Their partnership has helped Enlaye roll out its solution with operational teams across the group, which is ranked second in the world on ENR’s Top 250 International Contractors list.
“Risk management is obviously essential to the success of any project,” said Christian Tricoire, director of VINCI Construction Major Projects USA.
“Enlaye’s solution is a natural fit for our operations, especially during the bidding phase, where it helps us analyze large volumes of contractual and technical data,” he adds. “It allows us to identify key issues faster, better assess our risk exposure and support more informed decision-making.”
