MSIV Invests in Greenbrae’s ConCntric
Q&A with Founder & CEO Steve Dell’Orto
Monday, January 27, 2025 from Greenbrae, CA
In 2021, Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures launched the North Bay’s first regional venture capital fund and began deploying capital into Marin + Sonoma’s most promising startup companies.
Today, we are excited to share details around our 2024 investment in Greenbrae’s ConCntric, a commercial construction software startup focused on unifying data, workflows, and stakeholders working in the preconstruction phase of commercial grade building projects.
ConCntric ensures collaboration between general contractors, owners/developers, and design teams at the crucial preconstruction phase, providing access to real-time insights and reliable data. Teams using ConCntric can test new ideas and assess and mitigate risk before putting shovels in the ground.
ConCntric’s vision is to take the fractured preconstruction environment and unify these processes in one easy-to-use platform that provides a single source of truth for these expensive, yet-to-be-started projects.
Why We Invested
Over the past two decades, construction technology has grown as an emerging field, with various software platforms changing the way large projects are run, and Procore emerging as one of the most dominant technologies.
While change has been felt in the building phase, the preconstruction phase - think site evaluation, permitting, design development, budget estimation, environmental review, and stakeholder collaboration - has largely remained an email and spreadsheets process.
ConCntric founder Steve Dell’Orto spent over 26 years in senior positions at Clark Construction, one of the nation’s largest commercial builders. At Clark, Steve oversaw the western region that grew to generate $2B in annual revenue with 500 staff across four offices. His team oversaw some of the most well-known projects in our region’s recent history, including the Chase Center and Salesforce Tower, and every day in his job he lived the pain from a disjointed preconstruction environment that he’s now working to solve with ConCntric.
The company now counts some of the largest commercial builders in the country as customers and is poised for explosive growth in the months and years ahead.
MSIV Founder & Managing Partner Zachary Kushel sat down with ConCntric Founder & CEO Steve Dell’Orto to discuss the commercial building industry and ConCntric’s vision to streamline preconstruction workflows.
ConCntric CEO Steve Dell’Orto
ZK: Steve, when did the light bulb go off for you with the idea for ConCntric?
SD: Last decade, I was running Clark Construction’s west coast operations, where our team oversaw massive growth. We went from a few hundred million in business to $2 billion in annual revenue, all while increasing our profit margins by 44%. So much of our success was driven by our ability to skillfully plan each job – interacting with our clients, partnering with the architects and designers – and behind that was a fundamentally manual, arduous task of planning in spreadsheets. We literally had 40 different Excel workbooks representing different workflows, and that’s how we built the Salesforce Tower and Warriors arena.
This was no way to plan billion-dollar projects, let alone projects 1/10 the size, and I just sat in too many meetings with what I considered to be an A+ planning team on these jobs where there were inevitable miscommunications and many people hours wasted given this manual process. I saw technology making an impact in other industries, and even in the construction phase of our own industry, and I couldn’t fathom why we let the most important stage of any project, where the risk profile was being adopted and capex budgets being committed, continue to be run this way. So I set out to build a platform that would change all of that.
ZK: That’s such a powerful founding story. You lived the problem for years, so knew precisely what you wanted to go out and fix. What gave you the guts to take the plunge into entrepreneurship having never been a tech founder before?
SD: It’s certainly not typical for someone in a senior leadership position, who spent 26 years at the same company, to go out and start a software company as a non-technologist. But I’ve always been very systems-minded and very visual, and I had a good friend in Marin that I was talking this through with and he said, “You know, Steve, you built these massive buildings, even though you’re not a structural engineer.”
His point was that it’s the founder’s job to have the vision and then assemble a team that has the skills to bring that vision to reality. It’s no different from overseeing the construction of a skyscraper – it’s my job to surround myself with top talent and ensure we are constantly meeting or exceeding our goals and objectives. So I launched ConCntric and we haven’t looked back since.
ZK: Help our community understand all that preconstruction entails as opposed to construction.
SD: We’re focused on commercial building, not residential, but to use an analogy on the residential side, if you’re renovating your house, before the contractor starts building a single wall, you’re meeting with an architect, reviewing budget options, and constantly iterating and tweaking the plan to finalize what you want.
Now imagine you are trying to build the Chase Center – it’s the same process, same anxieties, but with a lot more zeroes tacked on and a lot more people. Prior to starting construction, there's an immense amount of architect design work, builder planning, and corresponding estimating and budgeting support to track with the design. Sometimes this can take six months, but for a massive project like the Chase Center, this took 36 months, which was longer than the build itself which took 32 months.
ZK: Can you share more about your product vision for ConCntric and what you believe the future of preconstruction planning should look like?
SD: We are taking those 40+ different workflows that were formerly tracked in spreadsheets and digitizing this in a platform that serves as the single source of truth for a project. ConCntric is a preconstruction hub and everyone involved in the project completes their work in the platform, so everyone has visibility.
Data from past projects can be leveraged to help inform your current project and help provide more accurate forecasts, and we’re leveraging the latest intelligence and AI tools within the platform to ensure that each job is better planned and achieves better outcomes. That is our core mission – to make the built world more predictable, affordable, and sustainable.
ZK: What attracted you to Marin and what’s it been like building your company from here?
SD: Working in large commercial construction is a very nomadic career path, and I was fortunate enough for my former company to have moved me up here in 2008 to focus on this region. My wife and I now have two girls – one is in college, and a proud graduate of Redwood High School, and the other is a 7th grader at Kent. My 7th grader was born in Marin General. Being a girl dad, there was always a need for more parents to help support the local sports programs, and I’ve been very involved as a member of the Ross Valley Lacrosse Club as a coach for a number of years among other programs for soccer and basketball.
We love Greenbrae and never plan to leave. Our best friends are here, and my in-laws live up in Healdsburg, so I was very attracted to the mission of MSIV and to this concept of building a more robust local startup community. MSIV has done such a wonderful job of focusing on community building for local entrepreneurs, and at ConCntric we want to take advantage of the incredible talent that lives in this community as we grow. We understand the local history, with the success of companies like Autodesk and Glassdoor, and we want this to continue here and for the future to see more startups grow locally on an ever-expanding basis.
Members of the ConCntric team at a 2024 industry conference in San Diego
ZK: You’re currently growing the team (see open positions here) – what should local startup operators know about coming to work for ConCntric?
SD: We are solving something very exciting. The projects that ConCntric is helping streamline are so vital to our society, and we want to help firms make better choices on what we build and how we build it, from cost efficiencies to the environmental impact. We’re an early-stage company, so it’s an exciting time for our employees, as we award everyone the flexibility and entrepreneurial spirit that you don’t really see at more mature companies. While we are a global startup, with employees all over, we intentionally want to build more of a presence here in Marin and I’d love to talk to anyone excited by our mission. I can promise you there is never a dull day.
