The role of new-age digital technology has become all pervasive in business operations. Today the conventional construction industry is not only about hardware but also very much about software.
Construction is largely a fragmented industry. Project teams form, build, dissolve, and re-form in different ways. Each team uses varied tools that represent data differently. According to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness, the US construction industry generates more than $16 billion every year in waste due to lack of data interoperability between project stakeholders. This erodes margins unnecessarily, and lowers morale for employees.
This problem can be solved by Agave. Agave is one of the new-age companies engaged in facilitating the operations of the construction industry through digital platforms. Agave can be described as a San Francisco-based construction specific data integration platform. . It links numerous dispersed cloud and on-premises systems into a single tool. Tom Reno, Pooria Azimi and Samantha Zhang and John Zucchi are the Co-founders of Agave. Prior to Agave, Tom worked at Amazon Alexa, leading three engineering teams. Before Amazon, Tom worked at Barclays Investment Bank, and Graphiq (which was acquired by Amazon in 2017).
Agave provides a Unified API for construction. It gives developers a single API to access data and take actions across software commonly used in construction – project management, ERP, scheduling, bidding, and more.
For those not so technologically savvy, a Unified API is a single interface for software applications in the same category. It makes integration easier by abstracting away the differences between applications and providing a standardized endpoint, authentication, and normalized data. It creates a consistent developer experience with less integration hassle, eliminating the need to learn the intricacies of each service.
According to Crunchbase, Agave provides a unified API for data access across various construction software platforms. Agave simplifies the process for developers to incorporate software utilised within the construction industry. Agave does this by unifying fragmented and legacy systems in a well-documented API that any developer can use to integrate in hours, not weeks.
The Agave API facilitates integration for construction software firms with numerous outdated and fragmented software systems, which are pivotal in managing construction projects, through a unified API. Additionally, the Agave API aids construction companies by streamlining manual tasks and offering real-time analytics via a no-code interface driven by its API.
Agave also facilitates construction software companies to integrate with other source systems with ease. “We provide a unified API to access data across all the construction software platforms like Procore, BIM 360, QuickBooks Online, and more. We also save you time by providing best-in-class documentation and pre-built front end components,” informs the website of Agave.
Agave facilitates software developers building construction products. It offers a user-friendly interface component for integration into your application, allowing users to retrieve data from various products such as Procore. Moreover, Agave enables you to perform actions on behalf of your users within those products, like synchronizing data and generating entries. By leveraging Agave, your application can expand its functionality and appeal to a broader customer base, thereby accelerating your growth trajectory.Agave reduces the time it takes to launch new integrations from weeks to hours.
For software developers working at construction firms like specialty contractors, Agave consolidates internal data within a secure framework, establishing linkages between various sources (e.g., estimates linked to projects with defined start and end dates).. This creates a reliable source of truth to use for internal products like dashboards, project archives, supplier databases, and document workflows. Agave affords a simple way to keep data in sync across software, which is particularly useful for companies working on multiple projects and across multiple systems simultaneously.
Till August 2023, Agave connected with 33 software systems and had 950 endpoints on its API. Providing users real-time analytics is a benefit of Agave’s API, which is reflected in daily logs like worker counts and total hours across different projects. Showing RFIs (requests for information), or documents which can influence the status of a project is another user benefit that Agave is endowed with.
Agave raised 2.9 million USD in its latest funding round led by Accel, which was Seed round held on 30thAugust 2023 and has raised a total funding of 3.02 million USD over two rounds.
