ASHEVILLE – Ecobot, the provider of a cloud-based platform designed to enhance effectiveness and efficiency in mandatory pre-construction environmental permitting, has raised more than $2.8 million from nine investors.
Cary-based Cofounders Capital is among its backers.
“We’re excited to bring these new partners together,” said Ecobot CEO Lee Lance, in a statement shared with WRAL TechWire. “This latest funding round and the collective expertise of our investors supports our vision to expand Ecobot, allowing us to bring our transformative platform to more stakeholders throughout the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.”
Lance told WRAL TechWire in an interview that the company’s software helps engineers and builders begin and complete large-scale construction projects faster, noting that the company has helped clients conduct more than 45,000 analysis since its founding in 2018.
“We’re able to help our customers do that work twice as fast, with a significantly greater accuracy than either cobbling together excel, handwritten notes, or other software tools,” said Lance.
To meet mandatory environmental permitting regulations, an environmental analysis must be done any time prior to moving dirt, noted Lance.
“There’s a huge amount of time spent on environmental permitting ahead of construction,” said Lance. “Ecobot provides an opportunity to leverage the data that is generated through the normal existing procedures.”
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The data generated through the use of Ecobot’s software can assist the company’s customers’ engineering teams solve problems more effectively, said Lance.
“For example, one of our customers, and we have a case study about this, is that they were using Ecobot on a 3,000 acre agricultural site conversion to a solar power plant,” said Lance.
The company sought to develop its software solution such that it would become “invisible,” noted Lance. “It so closely matches the offline process that the digital version of the workflow is almost something that doesn’t have to be learned,” he said. “When you’re able to do that, that’s how you begin to see the efficiency gains, such as the ones that our customers see.”
The result is a more effective, efficient workflow, with the benefit of collecting usable data from field analysis, Lance noted.
“By better understanding the natural environment, engineers are able to plan and create a more resilient built environment,” said Lance. “that helps bust silos between different parts of the organization, and different parts of the process.”
And, added Lance, at a time when nearly every organization is concerned about attracting and retaining talent, the software provided by Ecobot streamlines existing processes and workflows of field teams.
“The crux of what Ecobot is,” said Lance. “Is that it allows more work with the same headcount.”
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The funding round includes Cultivation Capital, which led the round, and existing investor Cofounders Capital. Other investors Runway Venture Partners, SaaS Venture Capital, Shadow Ventures, Stout Street Capital, and the Charlotte Angel Fund. In total, the investors are putting in $2,806,278, according to the firm’s SEC filing, in an equity deal.
“This capital will allow Ecobot to continue to execute on its plan while adding new talent to this already amazing team,” said Tim McLoughlin, Ecobot board member, and partner at Cofounders Capital.
Lance noted that the funds enable the company to widen the scope of environmental permits, add additional project management tools to the software platform, and investigate more integrated methods of leveraging field data into “a digital twin to improve the resilience of the built environment.”
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