Construction software startup Planera raises $5.4M in seed round   

Construction software startup Planera has raised $5.4 million in seed funding, an anomaly in an increasingly harsh environment for early-stage and mid-stage proptech firms. 

The San Jose company, which was established in 2021 by a former executive at San Francisco-based location services platform Life360, runs a building project schedule software that streamlines the planning and estimation process for construction companies. The funding round was led by Sorenson Ventures and Firebolt Ventures, both in Palo Alto. 

“The people with the most construction experience and expertise often don’t know how to use complicated, legacy scheduling software. This results in project delays, estimation errors and client frustration. Planera is so simple that anyone with job knowledge can create a resource-loaded schedule in hours instead of weeks,” Planera CEO Nitin Bhandari said in a statement. 

The firm’s clients include Irvine-based firm Shimmick Construction and San Francisco firm Webcor. 

The deal comes as observers forecast a “mass extinction event” for early-stage and mid-stage startups this year. A survey from last March found that around four out of five startups are in danger of running out of capital this year. The survey, which included responses from 450 company founders in the U.S. and Europe, tied the existential risk for startups to the reluctance of venture capital firms to fund seed rounds. 

The predictions have since been paired with concrete evidence. According to Crunchbase, global venture capital funding during the first quarter dropped 53 percent to $76 billion compared to a year ago. Also, in its latest ranking of the most active investors, perennial leaders such as SoftBank Vision Fund failed to even make the top 20.  

Earlier this year, in a report by The Real Deal on the “proptech apocalypse,” one investor said “it’s like a faucet got turned off” as funding has dried up this year.