In 2021, on a flight from Dubai to Kerala, one of us sat next to a stranger. He was a builder, US-educated, with generations of the trade behind him, and for four hours he gave a masterclass in his industry: how the building that goes up is never quite the building that was drawn, how money leaks in the distance between the two, how it all gets handed over as boxes of paper nobody will ever open. Not his complaints. His diagnosis. The things every builder fights, that even the best can only fight harder than the rest.
We were enterprise software people. We had spent years listening to companies describe broken processes. This was different. Here was an industry whose process was not broken so much as never connected in the first place, and here was someone who had mastered it telling us exactly where the connections were missing.
The flight ended. The problem did not. It sat there through another company founded and another chapter closed, and it was still sitting there when we went back to him and asked him to show us his world properly. He did. Korbel is what we saw.
Every stage of a build already has software. Design has its tools, cost has its spreadsheets, site has its registers. What nobody has ever had is the thread between them, because carrying it meant asking site engineers, vendors and supervisors to live inside enterprise software. They will not. They never will. And they are right.
What changed is not construction. It is the interface. AI can now meet every person on a build where they already work, a photo, a voice note, a WhatsApp message, and turn it into a permanent record. The thread that was too heavy for process is light enough for software. That is the whole company.
One of us spent a decade building businesses inside companies: ventures taken from zero to millions in revenue and hundreds of enterprise customers, through an acquisition and an earn-out cycle. The other comes from the deep end of enterprise technology, global firms on the CV, and most recently the generative AI practice of one of them under his leadership.
Then we built a company together. A venture that put generative AI to work on hard enterprise problems, helping large firms survive the paradigm shift. We exited it to our other co-founders. Korbel is what we build next.
We did not grow up on construction sites. We know it. It is why Korbel is built with builders as partners, not sold to them as customers, and why every feature on this site was shaped by people who have stood where you stand.
Including the man from the plane.
We are taking on a handful of builders as early partners, not customers.
Just a couple more details.
Privacy: your name, email and phone number are used once, to arrange this call. Korbel does not share them with anyone and deletes them on request. See our privacy policy, or write to hello@korbel.ai.
{{ calledMsg }}