Turner Construction Co. on March 17 unveiled Turner Ventures, an internal program to support early-stage startups transforming construction with a focus on entities centered on decarbonization and digitalization of the construction process. 

Other large contractors such as Suffolk Construction and DPR Construction have started their own venture capital arms in recent years. Turner’s relative position as the largest contractor by volume in the U.S. gives it the industry heft to both test startups’ technology on its sites and to directly fund the startups.

Turner Chief Innovation Officer Jim Barrett says Turner Ventures will adopt a long-term, high-impact approach, fully integrating startups into Turner’s ecosystem of projects and jobsites, which spans over $20 billion in annual construction projects and a global network of clients, suppliers and partners. Artificial intelligence is an immediate area of focus for investments.

“Whether it’s ChatGPT or whatever, it’s so easy to build that software and now to launch a business. So we’re only going to see more [AI] startups,” Barrett says. “We’re going to see probably an exponential growth in the number of startups in our industry and outside of our industry. So, this is a response to that, How do we have a structured program to engage with them, to evaluate the opportunities, to consider whether a startup is really the tackling a meaningful problem or unlocking a meaningful opportunity?”

Multistage Support

The program will offer three avenues to support startups at various growth stages, he said. The first is incubation, where startups will collaborate directly with Turner to pilot, test and validate their innovations on actual projects. The second is ignite, where Turner provides mentorship and guidance to established startups still refining their solutions. Finally, in the invest stage, Turner will  make strategic capital investments in high-potential startups with the goal of accelerating their growth.

“Particularly with climate tech, we think our unique advantage is scale,” Barrett says, noting that these technologies are capital intensive. “They really need that boost to get to some sort of a level of scale that they can become cost competitive, or get to price parity to existing solutions. That’s where I think we can offer ourselves as a  unique channel to look at our 1,500 projects that we have active in any given day, as laboratories to test these products, introduce them to our clients, architects, engineer partners and then scale them.”

While there are diverse startups of varying degrees of maturity targeting construction every single year, Barrett says Turner’s three-pronged strategy—incubation, ignite and invest— can fit them all, depending on the needs of the startup.

“This isn’t something we just came up with suddenly,” he says. “It’s actually been 10 years of working our way towards this and innovating, working with startups, working with VCs.”