4 April 2023, 09:00
DigiMessenger #11
California-based company Linarc is a construction technology platform designed for contractors, owners and designers and brings all parties together to work in a collaborative project workspace. Patrik Eder sat together with Shanthi Rajan, CEO/Founder of Linarc, and discussed the company’s background, its main purpose, the level of optimalization, security and data storage, regions of interest as well as goals for 2023.
PE: Can you briefly introduce your company?
SR: Linarc is a collaborative construction technology solution and increases the efficiency and quality of the build process. The platform helps contractors manage projects and construction operations. Linarc is a multi-stakeholder platform and supports many of the workflows in construction, effortlessly connects office to field and dissolves contractor silos. The project workspace brings all contractors and their team together in a shared collaborative space.
The solution is modular and allows contractors to decide what they want to implement. Some of the major modules include Plan Room, Budget & Estimates, Scheduler, RFI, Change Order, Submittals and Resource Planner, Payroll Manager. Linarc is available on the web and on the mobile. Every user of Linarc has a specific role assigned. This allows us to let everyone get information they need to do their job well. Consider a foreman at a job site. With Linarc, the foreman can easily pull tasks from the project schedule and look at all relevant documents – Spec book, RFI or Submittal attached to it. All relevant files can be linked to a task for quick and efficient access.
PE: When and by whom was it founded? Where is the company based?
SR: Linarc was founded by me as I was working on a different project, and I started to learn more and more about construction industry. I was fascinated by buildings and construction itself and decided to start Linarc. The company is based in California and right now we are in Los Angeles.
PE: Is Linarc the first company that you have founded?
SR: No, this is my third product company. The first one was in the immersive learning space and it was acquired by IBM. The second was in the e-commerce, CRM, customer support space, it was an omnichannel project and that was acquired by a company that is now a part of Verint. After that I worked in several consulting roles and subsequently founded Linarc.
PE: It seems like Linarc is a complex platform. What is its main purpose?
SR: I see it as a modular platform. More like multiple applications that work well with each other. The vision is to make it easy for contractors to stay on one solution and get most of their work done - that’s the vision. So, as a project manager I don’t have to have my schedule in Microsoft project, have the budget in a different system, my field images on share point, plan files on a cloud drive, etc. Instead everything from plan sheets to punch list are all on one platform, you log-in to Linarc and it pulls various data into the centralized collaborative platform.
PE: Is the platform also optimized for mobiles or is it just desktop?
SR: Linarc works on web and mobile devices. Our native iOS and Android applications are optimized for mobile phones & tablets. Field workers like foreman, project engineers, site superintendent and field crew can access project information, share updates, access schedules & project documents from mobile apps.
PE: Who are your customers?
SR: Linarc platform is a collaborative project workspace and supports the needs of prime and speciality prime & speciality contractors. Our customers are in the small to mid-market with revenues from 20 million to about 250 million, that’s our sweet spot. We also work with channel partners, resellers and owner consultants.
PE: How do you store and secure the collected data?
SR: Security is built into the our solution, cloud products, the AWS infrastructure we are built on and access controlled processes. We use reliable and proven systems for authentication, access & identity management. We encrypt data on transit and storage so rest assured that customer data is safe and secured.
Access to Linarc is further strengthened by user roles and permissions. Every company can define their internal data access with custom roles and related access. If a contractor is running 20 projects on Linarc , a project manager will have access only to projects they are working on. Data access is further strengthened by a user’s subscription to the data.
PE: What are the most important markets/regions for your business?
SR: We are a start-up and growing our presence in USA and Canada. We will look at other markets - Europe, Middle East, parts of Asia and even Australia. But right now, we are expanding in the North American market.
PE: What are your business goals for the next few years?
SR: We would like to grow and expand within North America to open offices in different parts - in Texas and then New York area as well as a little bit up north. In order to serve global areas, we will open offices in those areas. There is no way I can sell into Europe unless we have an office set up, especially in Europe as well to reach target customers there. So, as we choose to expand into Australia or Europe, we will open offices there as well. We are also growing and developing our customer-access, marketing and sales teams and we hope to grow and double the number of employees by the end of 2023.
<< Previous page Eco-friendly material handling
Source: LECTURA GmbH