Turner Construction Co. on March 17 unveiled Turner Ventures, an internal program to support early-stage startups transforming construction with a focus on startups centered on decarbonization and digitalization of the construction process.
Other large contractors such as Suffolk Construction and DPR Construction have started their own venture capital arms in recent years. Turner’s relative position as the largest contractor by volume in the U.S. gives it the industry heft to both test startups’ technology on its sites and to fund directly fund the startups.
Turner Chief Innovation Officer Jim Barrett says Turner Ventures will adopt a long-term, high-impact approach, fully integrating startups into Turner’s extensive ecosystem of projects and jobsites, which spans over $20 billion in annual construction projects and a global network of clients, suppliers, and partners. And artificial intelligence is an immediate area of focus for investments.
“Whether it’s ChatGPT or whatever, it’s so easy to build that software and now to launch a business. So we’re only going to see more [AI] startups,” Barrett says. “We’re going to see probably an exponential growth in the number of startups in our industry and outside of our industry. So, this is a response to that, How do we have a structured program to engage with them, to evaluate the opportunities, to consider whether a startup is really the tackling a meaningful problem or unlocking a meaningful opportunity?”
Multistage Support
The program will offers three distinct avenues to support startups at various growth stages, he said. The first is incubation, where startups will collaborate directly with Turner to pilot, test, and validate their innovations on actual projects. The second is ignite, where Turner provides mentorship and industry guidance to established startups still refining their solutions. Finally, Turner will also make strategic capital investments in high-potential startups, accelerating their growth.
“Particularly with climate tech, we think our unique advantage is scale,” Barrett says. There’s a unique challenge for climate tech, as the technologies, themselves, are capital intensive. It’s not just software, you’re looking at hardware or materials or products. They really need that boost to get to some sort of a level of scale that they can become cost competitive, or get to price parity to existing solutions. That’s where I think we can we can offer ourselves as a very unique channel to to look at our 1,500 projects that we have active in any given day, as laboratories to test these products, introduce them to our clients, architects, engineer partners, and then scale them.”
Barrett says that as the largest builder in the U.S., and part of a global organization that includes ACS Group, Dragados and its corporate parent, Hochtief, Turner can bring to scale climate tech solutions. While there are diverse startups of varying degrees of maturity targeting construction every single year, Barrett says the company believes the three prongs of Turner’s strategy can fit them all, while the investment strategy can go across all three depending on the needs of the startup.
“This isn’t something we just came up with suddenly,” he says. “It’s actually been 10 years of working our way towards this and innovating, working with startups, working with VCs.”
