How PermitFlow’s Making Us a Nation of Builders (Again)

America isn’t building fast enough, and everywhere you look, it’s causing problems. Latest studies indicate that we’re 4 million homes short of demand. Supply constraint begets an affordability crisis: the median U.S. household income is 40% lower than what’s needed to afford a new mortgage. Without more housing, our cities continue to struggle to address homelessness on a systemic level. The construction bottleneck even slows the pace of innovation across our economy. The AI race hinges on our ability to build data centers fast enough, while across the country our energy infrastructure continues to lag behind our needs. 

PermitFlow makes it cheaper, easier, and faster to build, by directly addressing construction’s biggest bottleneck: the permitting process. In 1960, it took just four months to get a permit to build a new commercial business. Today, it could take a year and a half. While overall construction productivity has declined 6% during the same period, permitting has gotten an eye-popping 400% slower. It’s clear: to begin to build at the pace we need, we must fix permitting. 

Permitting is complex, a labyrinth of research, forms, emails, and follow up (and more follow up). 

To manage this complex workflow, PermitFlow’s AI permitting agents actually orchestrates dozens of specialized agents, each purpose-built for a different task in the workflow. And PermitFlow cares deeply about the expertise and precision with which the agents manage the permitting process, since it leads to better and faster outcomes. They’re trained on industry best practices and the industry’s largest AI-ready, labelled permitting dataset. 

Across different regions and organizations, it’s working. Customers using PermitFlow see a 55-85% reduction in days to permit approval, a dramatic improvement that also has major downstream implications on the costs to build. 

As the PermitFlow team has mastered permitting, they’ve begun translating that operational and technical foundation into a broader end-to-end construction AI platform that not only accelerates approvals, but also increasingly manages the entire pre-construction lifecycle. This is a significant unlock: Once you automate the most painful chokepoint, you’re uniquely positioned to streamline everything that comes before and after it.

We first invested in PermitFlow at the series A, and we are thrilled to double down on the company to support their accelerated growth and momentum. The value they’ve created for customers, trove of data they’ve accumulated on the pre-construction process, and technical expertise they’ve developed for building agents that can nimbly manage the complex array of tasks involved in construction positions them incredibly well to expand to own the whole pre-construction process. And we believe that growth for PermitFlow means growth for all of us.