By Ceo Taiki Nozaki,The Bridge
Copyright thebridge
Zen Intelligence, which aims to automate construction sites, announced on the 25th that it has raised a total of ¥1.5 billion in its Series A round. Investors include Z Venture Capital, Angel Bridge, Rice Capital, Firstlight Capital, and Incubate Fund, with additional loans from the Japan Finance Corporation and Resona Bank.
The company’s product, “zenshot”, transforms construction sites into 3D digital twins from 360-degree videos, analyzing changes in processes, safety, and quality using a Vision-Language Model. By simply walking with a 360° camera for 2-3 minutes on-site, the AI generates a 3D/360° site view automatically mapped to blueprints. After automatic upload to the cloud, it enables comparison of past and present locations and online sharing with stakeholders, integrating remote process, safety, and quality checks into daily operations.
The key feature is the combination of a construction-specialized VLM and AI agents that autonomously execute decisions and instructions traditionally handled by humans.
With this funding, the company plans to deploy its Vision-Language Model (VLM) and AI agents optimized for construction to the field, aiming to gradually achieve unmanned site management through autonomous execution of observations, cause estimation, and instructions. In the future, they aim to integrate hardware and robotics, pursuing “Physical AI” that directly connects the physical space with AI.
The funds will be allocated to the research and development of AI agents and VLM, development of on-site data acquisition devices, and recruitment, focusing on strengthening top engineers and business development personnel in the AI and mechatronics fields.
The team led by CEO Taiki Nozaki was founded in July 2020 by engineers who had been involved in AI and robotics research at the University of Tokyo and Keio University. The company’s former name was SoftRoid, and it raised approximately 220 million yen in a pre-Series A round in March 2024. zenshot has published case studies of implementations at residential construction sites and other locations, achieving everything from rapid digital twin creation to remote monitoring.
The construction industry faces a chronic labor shortage, with predictions that by 2030 there will be a shortage of approximately 45,000 construction engineers and 179,000 skilled workers. The combination of an aging workforce, declining numbers of young workers entering the field, and the application of work style reform-related laws has created a “supply capacity shortage” – a social issue where demand exists but cannot be met due to insufficient supply capacity.
The company continues to strengthen its foundational technologies in 3D Vision and foundation models, including being selected for the third phase of “GENIAC,” a domestic generative AI foundation model development project by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and NEDO. With this Series A funding, the company is taking a full turn toward its business expansion phase, aiming to achieve unmanned construction sites through “strengthening supply capacity via Physical AI.”
via PR TIMES
