[MUSIC PLAYING]
Everyone at Katalyst is using Foundry.
My name is Brett Rogers.
I founded Katalyst Digital Infrastructure
in February of 2021.
We were funded to integrate the supply chain in a way
that the design and construction community would benefit.
I originally started to think about this problem
in probably September 2018.
I was running around $8 billion of work
within my team at the time, and we ended up
having a tremendous disruption to the projects
that we were delivering from a very mundane component.
And as we started to study what was causing those delays,
we found out that we controlled something like 50% to 60%
of the world's supply chain for that particular component.
We realized that integrating the supply chain, which
is enormously disaggregated in our industry,
and getting them onto a common platform
became tremendously important.
I'm Libo.
I'm a classically-trained architect.
At Katalyst, I'm the Chief Technology Officer
where I work with my enormously talented team
to try to build technology that really lowers
the friction for anyone in any touch
point along a construction project.
For us, Foundry has unlocked speed, potential
and really opened our minds.
I think we, in fact, went in with a de facto attitude
that we would build something on our own.
We quickly realized that wasn't going to be a good case for us.
We looked at Snowflake and some other big data options.
I think it was probably March of last year, or potentially
April, that our CTO, Libo Lee, sent me a video to the Foundry
Demo Day 2021.
And I probably watched it three or four times that night.
And right away we knew we had the solution
that we wanted to implement.
So construction's largely a spatial industry.
There's millions of data points that
exist spread across hundreds, or maybe thousands,
of different data sets.
What we want to do is create a data environment
where those are all integrated together
in order to allow design and construction teams to make
better decisions based on the analysis behind the data
that we're collecting and integrating.
Long term, our idea is that Foundry
becomes an integral part of our data interface,
where we can assemble a common gateway that expresses building
logic and integrates supply chain realities so that anyone
looking for answers to a potential building question
can get it from a single source.
Our team is really curious, and we just
set them loose on Foundry ever since we've gotten it.
There is a small interdisciplinary team
that's working on going from a BIM model in Revit
all the way to a ontological simulation in Vertex
We feel that the vast majority of folks
look at projects as a one and done effort,
whereas we believe that construction
is a part of the total supply chain
and by integrating information both upstream on the demand
side and downstream on the supply side
that we can make much smarter decisions about what we build
and how we build it.
In the future, we hope that we're
viewed as an operating system for the construction industry
supply chain.
We can start to see construction delivery function a whole lot
more like manufacturing does.
And the result of that would be much higher productivity,
more globally accessible first class infrastructure,
and lower cost projects.
Foundry has unlocked a future that I
don't think we saw coming for a very long time.
It's unlocked the ability for us to think
about our endeavor at probably two
to three orders of magnitude scale greater
than we originally did.