Dive Brief:
- Engineering and professional services company WSP USA has unveiled the four startups selected to participate in its new growth accelerator, the Emerging Growth Partnership Program, according to a press release.
- Bayotech, Bundle, DisasterTech and Sphera will participate in the first cohort, and were selected from a pool of 39 applicants.
The program will help the firms refine, optimize and scale their offerings, according to the release. - Climate, resilience and sustainability are the focus of the inaugural cohort, and future cohorts will be based on different WSP target markets, according to the release.
Dive Insight:
The initial phase of the pilot lasts three months, during which the firms will work with WSP to refine their products and target them to clients.
"We are very excited that the CRS is leading the way to demonstrate the tremendous possibilities that the EGPP can open to WSP and our partners," Tom Lewis, the business line executive for the cohort, said in the release. Lewis said that the program offers "significant growth potential" for the companies involved.
The four companies selected to participate in the inaugural cohort are, according to the release:
DisasterTech, Alexandria, Virginia: DisasterTech developed the Decision Science Integrated Collaboration Environment (DICE) platform to help disaster planning and response professionals make informed decisions based on situational understanding. The technology converges cross-sector real-time data and accelerates analytics using geospatial, charting, graphing and text analysis.
Sphera, Stockton-on-Trees, U.K.: Sphera is pioneering sustainable, science-led materials development to move the construction industry toward net zero carbon emissions. Sphera has used its aggregate to create the world's first potentially carbon negative and carbon zero concrete.
Bayotech, Albuquerque, New Mexico: Bayotech is an alternative fuel company focused on decentralizing supply and distribution of hydrogen gas to increase affordability, sustainability and accessibility. Its goal is to scale deployment of hydrogen fuel cell and other clean tech vehicles and equipment.
Bundle, Oakland, California: Bundle connects builders and suppliers on one platform in order to streamline procurement. The platform also aims to measure and track sustainability metrics for the building materials to help contractors assess and reduce their carbon footprint from the beginning of a project.
Construction technology is poised to have another strong year, particularly as interest in green technology and contech grows. CemexVentures, the corporate venture capital arm of Mexico-based construction materials company Cemex, released a list of the top 50 construction tech startups in 2021, with 14 in the green technology space and a significant subset of the platforms focusing on streamlining productivity.
"Four or five years ago, contractors were not investing, they were testing concepts. Today, you can see contractors are really investing in venture capital as well. And that, as a result, has been a huge increase in the amount of money flowing into this," Gonzalo Galindo, the president of Cemex Ventures, told Construction Dive.
