Startups
Critical infrastructure design startup Transcend just raised a $20 million Series B round with this 13-slide pitch deck
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- Transcend enables companies to design more sustainable and resilient critical infrastructure.
- The startup, founded in 2019, just secured $20 million for its software-as-a-service platform.
- We got an exclusive look at the 13-slide pitch deck it used to raise the Series B.
A software-as-a-service startup set on making critical infrastructure more sustainable and resilient just secured a $20 million Series B.
Princeton-based Transcend has built a platform for designing water and energy infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment plants, which accounts for the carbon footprint and future resilience of the project.
The startup, founded in 2019, caters to the early planning stage of water and energy infrastructure projects where concepts are drawn up before going to a capital planning committee. It uses mechanical, electrical, and civil engineering calculations together with AI to optimize project design, the time it takes to produce, and to minimise manual work.
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“Today we spend hundreds of hours and months compiling just a single option. We don’t have time to actually compare those options and try to get to a better outcome,” cofounder and CEO Ari Raivetz said of infrastructure proposals.
With Transcend, designs can be iterated and compared as many times as needed to ultimately find the most cost effective or environmentally-friendly specification.
The company is riding political tailwinds in the US, which has committed $1.2 trillion to rebuild public infrastructure. Long term, it wants to cater to the full spectrum of infrastructure projects, from roads, bridges, and buildings to data centres.
A user spends up to 15 minutes inputting specific data about the project, which the platform uses to generate designs. The output is a 3D model of the site, carbon footprint estimates, lists of equipment and materials, cost calculations, and even documents that can be used to pitch the project.
The platform can also account for the changing climate. For example, users can set a temperature and only the materials that are resilient to that temperature will be used in generated designs. “That’ll show up in your 3D model, in your bill of quantities, and you can compare the cost. You can actually say ‘okay, well, to be resilient for that it’s gonna cost me this much more,'” Raivetz said.
Raivetz hopes Transcend will also help speed up the adoption of new climate tech systems or sustainable approaches by factoring them into designs and showing engineers that they can make financial and environmental sense, he added.
The company isn’t focused on a specific geographical market and already has customers across the globe. Raivetz said. They are split between asset owners themselves, engineering companies, and companies who pitch for infrastructure work, including infrastructure players Arcadis, Black and Veatch, Brookfield Asset Management.
The fresh funds came from architecture and engineering software company Autodesk, existing investors HG Ventures and PureTerra, and new investors Arosa Capital, Riverstone Holdings LLC, and Aspen Capital Group.
Currently a team of 80 in the US and Europe, Transcend plans to add headcount in its marketing and sales team.
Check out the 13-slide redacted pitch deck below:
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