Foresight raises $15M for its construction workers’ compensation platform

Published December 18, 2020

When an accident on a building site resulted in the death of their friend, the founders of Safesight were inspired to launch the platform to digitize safety programs for construction. The data from that gave birth to a new insurtech startup this year, Foresight, which covers workers’ compensation. The startup has now released, for the first time, news that it raised a $15 million funding round back in May this year, with participation from Blackhorn Ventures and Transverse Insurance Group. To date, it has raised $20.5 million from industrial technology venture capital firms, led by Brick and Mortar Ventures and Builders VC.

Foresight launched in August of this year but has already covered $30 million in risks. The company says it is now on pace to reach $50 million in underwritten premium in 2021. By leveraging the data from sister company Safesite, the platform says it has been able to reduce workers’ comp incidents by up to 57% in a study conducted by actuarial consulting firm Perr & Knight.

Foresight’s algorithm leverages Safesight data to predict incidents, highlight risks and inform underwriting. By wrapping Safesite risk management technology and services into every policy, Foresight provides a path to lower incident rates and lower premiums for customers.

Of the $57 billion national workers’ compensation market, Foresight focuses on policies ranging from $150,000 to $1 million+ in annual premiums. The company says this segment has been largely overlooked by well-funded insurtech startups such as Next Insurance and Pie, which provide small business policies under $50,000 in annual premiums.

Foresight and Safesite were developed by longtime friends and co-founders David Fontain, Peter Grant and Leigh Appel.

Fontain said: “Foresight strengthens the correlation between safety and savings while providing the fast and easy user experience insurtechs are known for. We leverage purpose-built technology to drive behavioral shifts and provide an irresistible alternative to traditional workers compensation coverage.”

Darren Bechtel, the founder and managing director at Brick & Mortar Ventures, commented: “We first invested in 2016 and have known the founders since 2015 when it was just the two of them, squatting at a couple of empty desks inside another portfolio company’s office. Their initial vision was both elegant and powerful, and the demonstrated impact of their solution on safety performance, even in early interactions with the product, was impossible to ignore.”

Foresight now covers Nevada, Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico. The company expects to launch workers’ compensation in the eastern U.S. and a general liability line in early 2021.

Levelset raises $30 million to improve money management for contractors in construction

Published December 19, 2019

Scott Wolfe, chief executive officer of Levelset, the New Orleans-based money management and payment startup for contractors in the construction industry, always thought he’d be in the grocery business.

His family owned a number of grocery stores around New Orleans and he was readying himself to go into the family business when Hurricane Katrina hit.

As the family business faced significant losses in their stores, the construction and contracting service they’d built to develop the land the stores were on had a tremendous opportunity. Within the span of a year, Wolfe had pivoted the family’s operations to focus on renovations and restorations and launched fully into construction.

It was during that time that Wolfe saw the need for some sort of software service that could manage cash flow and payment for the tens to hundreds of small business contractors involved in getting a project done.

So he built Levelset to be that service.

Now the company has closed on $30 million in financing from Horizons Ventures, the investment firm backed by Li Ka-shing, who is one of the world’s wealthiest billionaire property developers.

When Bart Swanson, an advisor to Horizons, met Levelset through a mutual friend who did some investing around the New Orleans-based Tulane University ecosystem, he immediately felt it was an opportunity that the Horizons investment committee would understand.

“This is a global issue,” says Swanson. “Sixty-four percent of construction businesses fail in their first five years because they have nowhere to turn for help,” when it comes to ensuring payment.

For now, Levelset is focused on digitizing billing and payments and providing insights into who is actually on a job site and the responsibilities that those workers have on site, according to Wolfe.

“There’s a ton of investment that has gone into the field,” says Wolfe. “What has seen a lack of as prolific an investment are things behind the scenes outside of the field that happen in the office. This is the accountants and administrative workers who have to take the information that’s in the field and turn it into money.”

For developers like Cheung Kong Holdings, Li’s development business, the promise of Levelset’s software is a huge boon. The construction industry runs on small businesses that lack software and services to process payments quickly. The time it takes to deal with paperwork can delay a project and ultimately cost developers money.

Horizons was joined in the new round by S3 Ventures, Operating Venture Capital, Altos Ventures and Darren Bechtel of Brick & Mortar Ventures. As a result of the investment, Swanson will take a seat on the company’s board.

In a recent survey of contractors by Levelset and T-Sheets by Quickbooks, more than half of contractors stated they were not paid on time and had significant cash flow challenges, and more than 75% craved more transparency in the payment process. This is no surprise, given PWC’s working capital studies in the past decade demonstrating that construction industry payment speeds are the slowest of all (83+ days).

“The effort required to get paid, and the cash stress put on contractors is unbelievable,” said Wolfe, in a statement. “The world’s biggest industry is full of small and medium businesses who are the fabric of our economy. It’s crucial that they can do their work without worrying about cash.”

Darren Bechtel (yes, of those Bechtels) has raised $97.5 million for his firm, Brick & Mortar Ventures

Published August 13, 2019

Brick & Mortar Ventures, a young, San Francisco-based venture firm that’s focused on startups innovating in or around architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management, has closed with $97.2 million in capital commitments.

The fund is one in a sea of debut funds that have swung open their doors in recent years, though it’s also interesting for numerous reasons, beginning with its founder, Darren Bechtel, who knows a thing or two about the building industry. He’s a scion of the family that built the 120-year-old, privately held company Bechtel into one of the largest construction and engineering firms in the world. In fact, his brother, Brendan, who was named CEO in 2016, represents the fifth generation of Bechtels to lead the company. (Their sister, Katherine, is a project controls manager with the powerhouse outfit.)

Brick & Mortar’s investors are just as notable. They aren’t the typical pension funds and university endowments that many VCs try hard to lock down. Instead, they comprise a long list of companies that are part of the “construction value chain” and so have an interest in the latest and greatest developments in their respective industries. Among the firm’s backers, for example, is the special materials maker Ardex; the software giant Autodesk; the building materials company CEMEX; Ferguson Ventures, which is the venture arm of a huge U.S distributor of plumbing supplies; FMI, a management consulting company to the engineering and construction industry; Obayashi, a major Japanese construction company; Sidewalk Labs, which is Alphabet’s urban innovation organization; and United Rentals, one of the world’s largest equipment rental companies.

Brick & Mortar isn’t the first venture firm to focus on the so-called built world. Other firms that focus largely, if not exclusively, around the same themes include Fifth Wall Ventures, Navitas Capital, Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, MetaProp, Starwood Capital and Tamarisc Ventures.

In fact, Darren Bechtel has ties to and is an individual investor in Fifth Wall, an LA-based firm that stormed onto the scene in 2017 with an equally impressive, and very different, roster of limited partners in the real estate industry, from which it has already amassed more than $700 million in capital commitments across two funds.

As Bechtel told us on a call late last week, he was going to go into business with Fifth Wall’s founders initially, but they wanted to raise a lot of money, and Bechtel was thinking more conservatively — for a reason. “I’d done five deals on AngelList with [Fifth Wall co-founder] Brendan [Wallace] and we’d started putting together a pitch deck, and as we were thinking through ideal fund structure and size, Brendan said $500 million and I said $50 million,” says Bechtel.

Wallace was thinking big, says Bechtel, because “hospitality already had some massive players — Airbnb, WeWork. It was a far more mature landscape, and Brendan thought that if we were going to own a category, we needed the capital to secure a leadership position in the right deals.”

Bechtel thinks Wallace was right, too. He says he just came to realize that construction tech — which is what really interested him — was in its own league, and it was in its infancy. Though the construction software company PlanGrid took off like gangbusters — Bechtel wrote the largest check during the company’s seed round — it wasn’t so long ago that “there were great, billion-dollar ideas being formed but the rounds were small and the valuations were small,” says Bechtel. Because the “investment community didn’t understand what it was looking at, I had concerns about our ability to generate returns if we had too large a fund.”

In the end, the friends and former Stanford MBA classmates decided to split their respective focus on real estate and hospitality (Fifth Wall) and the actual construction of buildings (Brick & Mortar), and things seem to have gone well since. As Fifth Wall has gained traction, so too has Brick & Mortar, which is now a couple of years in the making. Indeed, though Bechtel is announcing the close of Brick & Mortar’s first fund today, he already works with two principals and two associates, and they’ve collectively sourced and funded 16 startups to date with capital they’ve been raising from investors along the way.

One of those checks went to Fieldwire, a maker of field management software for construction teams. They’ve also backed Serious Labs, which trains workers how to use heavy equipment and tools via virtual reality software, and Curbio, a real estate technology startup that orchestrates turnkey renovations for home sellers, then gets paid back once the home is sold.

Brick & Mortar even has an exit already, having helped fund the construction software platform BuildingConnected, which sold last December to Autodesk. (Bechtel’s earlier investment in PlanGrid, which also sold to Autodesk last year, was a personal investment, one of roughly 40 he made before setting out to create a traditional venture firm.)

As for whether Brick & Mortar ever hunts for companies that Bechtel — the firm founded by Darren’s great-great-grandfather — might like to acquire or otherwise partner with, Darren is quick to note that the firm is not an investor in his venture fund or any or its portfolio companies, and he doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of what’s happening there.

“I don’t work at Bechtel or pretend to know what their intentions are, though my brother is CEO, so you could say I know a guy there.”

More, he notes, he doesn’t think it would make sense to fund a company that “a user would want to acquire. If one user buys [a startup’s tools] because they want exclusivity, they’re limiting the exit value of that company.” To underscore his point, he notes that “Bechtel does around $30 billion a year, but the construction market is an $11 trillion market.” In the end, he says, it’s “better to have a preferred relationship. Maybe you get the next year’s model released early; maybe you get custom colors.” But if you’ve developed a winning product, you want to make it accessible to everyone. “You benefit the most by having a technology adopted by the whole industry.”

Above, the Brick & Mortar Ventures team. From left to right: Austin Yount, senior associate; Alice Leung, associate; Curtis Rodgers, principal; Darren Bechtel, general partner; and Kaustubh Pandya, principal.