How A Teenage Carpenter Became The Founder Of AI Construction Startup Trunk Tools
figure — editor’s note: The following is the second profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interview with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here.
Before founding Trunk Tools, an AI startup for the construction industry, Sarah Buchner spent more than a decade working in construction. She grew up in a low-income household in Austria, where her father was a carpenter. When the family needed extra money he would take his children to job sites, and Buchner began working as a carpenter as a teenager. “I’m a blue-collar worker by background,” she explained. Buchner never really left the industry. She worked her way up and eventually became a general contractor, managing large construction projects in Europe. But her career took a turn after a worker died on one of the sites she was running. Experiencing the fatality changed the way she thought about her work. “Once you realize that people die under your management, you just look at life differently,” Buchner said. Sarah Buchner, founder of Trunk Tools. (Courtesy photo) She decided to build a health and safety app for construction workers. That company was separate from (and before) Trunk Tools, but the project pulled Buchner into software and eventually led her to pursue a Ph.D. focused on data science in construction and early artificial intelligence. While doing that research, she realized something that would later become central to Trunk Tools: Construction companies produce huge amounts of information, but much of it is fragmented across different systems and buried in documents, making it difficult to analyze. “The data was there,” Buchner said, but it was “so messy and so unstructured” that traditional data analytics could only go so far.
