SOSA’s hip workplace for construction-oriented tech startups in Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Construction is the biggest industry we have.High tech is number 2 … and we’re trying to connect the two.” UziScheffer is speaking of his home country and his company SOSA in Israel. The enormity of the construction industry ($1 trillion in the United States, and 10 times that worldwide) would create a windfall for tech companies should it ever modernize. Tech companies have been drooling about it for decades.
It has been slow going. While engineers can’t get enough tech (product designers are the first to raise their hands when new technology is offered), the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) community (and construction in particular) likes to hold technology at arm’s length. When products were being designed in 2D CAD, construction’s idea of high tech was a fax machine. Even when architects signed on for building information modeling tools, construction workers asked for PDFs on the job site.
When an entire country flies the tech flag (see Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle), it’s not surprising that it was a call from Israel to introduce us to a “tech hub” that promises to unite construction and high tech. I was going to hear about how SOSA was going to bring its construction industry up to tech speed. It was going to linkits tech construction–oriented startups to the companies that would benefit from them the…