See the pitch deck used by construction-tech startup Cove.tool – Business Insider

Big buildings and the construction industry are a huge consumer of energy and driver of carbon emissions.

And analyzing a building's design for energy efficiency is highly manual and can take more than a hundred hours to do.

Sandeep Ahuja, who founded and led an energy modeling consulting practice, Pattern r+d, told Business Insider that each project took roughly 150 hours of consultants' time.

Early attempts at automating her workflow eventually led her to partner with two brothers, Daniel and Patrick Chopson to create a software program that could do just that, slashing the time it takes to create energy models of a building to 15 minutes and shortening decision making about design revisions to an hour.

That software program has become a software-as-a-service company, Cove.tool, that provides energy modeling automation to architects, engineers, owners, and contractors. Daniel Chopson left his job as a senior software engineer for accounting company Sage to become CTO, while architect Patrick became COO.

The company raised a $5.7 million Series A round in October, led by early-stage venture investors Mucker Capital, and including previous investors Knoll Ventures, Urban Us, and TechSquare Labs. The round brings the company's total funds raised to $6.8 million, including a $150,000 investment the company received from Urban-X, an urban tech startup accelerator.

Ahuja said that the company now has thousands of paying users across 22 countries, such as real estate services firm JLL, construction giant Skanska, engineering firm P2S, and architecture and engineering firm EYP.

Ahuja said that a key part of making Cove.tool and energy efficiency appealing to developers is to make it financially attractive. As a result, the software takes energy efficiency and cost into the equation, outputting a design that will find the cheapest possible way to fit the energy efficiency protocols for the property.

"There are developers who don't care and just want to meet code minimum," Ahuja said. "They understand something when it relates back to cost."

Ahuja said that these cost-saving measures can save 2-3% on a building's expected construction cost, which may seem like a sliver, but when applied to multi-million dollar commercial construction, it can lead to major savings. If the software can also shorten costly construction delays through consolidating decision making into one software, those savings can be compounded.

Of the four major users, both contractors and developers are most interested in optimizing their buildings for cost.

"When you think about $100 million building, that adds up," Ahuja said.

On the other side, architects and engineers are most focused on time-saving, according to Ahuja, as well as saving money on costly consultants by switching to a monthly fee for a software package. Product manufacturers are an unlikely fifth user of the platform, which also can act as a marketing tool. The software compiles the energy-saving statistics and cost of every component included in the design and the final output suggests exactly what products should be used in construction to meet code and budgetary constraints.

Ahuja and Daniel Chopson walked Business Insider through the pitch deck that the company used to raise its most recent round of funding. The firm has altered three slides on its growth metrics and financials to hide their actual internal metrics, but show how they presented them to investors. Business Insider redacted the placeholder metrics for clarity, but kept the graphs and charts intact.

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See the pitch deck used by construction-tech startup Cove.tool - Business Insider