Diggs, a Vancouver, Washington-based startup developing collaboration tools for homebuilders and their sellers, is today announcing $7 million in seed funding from Fuse, Flying Fish, BetaWorks, Legacy, PSF.
The company was co-founded by Ryan Fink and Ty Frackiewicz. For Fink, this is his second attempt at a home-based startup. His previous company, Stereo, aimed to build a digital twin of the home using phone cameras and augmented reality. The idea here was to connect homeowners with remote professionals. Stream was eventually acquired by Frontdoor. He told me that after leaving Stream, he felt he couldn’t really fulfill the original mission of the service, so he decided to take another stab at it, but with a different perspective and with the goal of understanding the developer side.
Image Credits: Excavations
“[Ty and I] Both are built houses, so we understand the house owner’s side. And then the technology side around computer vision and machine learning, we both have pretty good experience there,” Fink explained. “So we wanted to try to figure out how to create a digital impression of a home without having to have anyone go and scan it.”
There is one clear point where you can have all this information, which is when the house is being built (and the team wants to deal with the existing houses, but later). Typically, architects, builders and suppliers these days work from PDFs – which can be drawings or inventory.
At the heart of Digs is a Dropbox-like file sharing tool, with collaboration features like Figma on top and essential computer vision tools for reading and understanding blueprints and other documents.
Excavator founders Ty Frackiewicz (l.) and Ryan Fink (r.)
“One of the things we’ve learned is that the first thing a builder does is send the contract and the design to all these vendors, print it, mark it up, they scan it – and the builder has now got seven or seven. Eight different versions. Not only are we storing all the data and choices and preferences, but we’re creating that collaborative piece. Therefore, when all decisions are made, it is digital rather than pen and paper.
One big decision the team made from the start was to make very few changes to the overall workflow that builders were already used to and instead focus on the biggest pain points. While the industry today is less tech negative than in the past, Fink believes there is a growing need to provide better experiences and developers have previously resorted to using Dropbox or SharePoint to store files.
“If they’re very comfortable, we’ll start — we’ll start with something that doesn’t look like software,” Fink said. “And we’re trying to take a lot of complex computation off the back burner to do very simple things that improve their lives.” This means that the service can automatically categorize components from blueprints and link that to your existing project management tool.
Image Credits: Excavations
In addition to providing this workspace to collaborate with vendors, he emphasized that a tool like Diggs can help the homeowner once the job is done. Nowadays, that manuscript consists of a large physical binder with all the information and maybe a few pamphlets and then ends up in a drawer somewhere. “Many builders we spoke to said they wanted to provide a better homeowner experience, but didn’t have the time to really research it,” explains Fink.
The group wants to focus on new builds for now and move into existing homes over time. This is a difficult problem to tackle, but Fink believes that as the team improves the platform, it can return to the knowledge of using cameras to digitize these gaps.
“The home is left behind while the rest of the world is being digitized. The Diggs team came to us with a vision to digitize their digs (homes) where people spend most of their time and bring collaboration and automation. That’s a big vision, and one we feel strongly about making it happen in the world,” says Brendan Wells, Founding Partner at Fuse.
