construction permitting process
If you’ve ever had to get a construction permit, you know that the process can be very painful and time-consuming. There are many reasons for this, and they vary depending on where you are located and what you are trying to get built.
Pulley is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to help speed up that process with its “purpose-built” software, and it has raised $4.4 million toward that effort.
Susa Ventures led its seed round, which interestingly included participation from other investors such as BoxGroup, Fifth Wall, Suffolk Construction and South Park Commons, but also a group of high-profile angels from within the industry as well as in the tech space in general. Those angels include Procore CEO and founder Tooey Courtemanche; Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub; Flexport CEO and founder Ryan Peterson; Built’s Chase Gilbert; and Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze.
Charlie Jacobson and Andreas Rotenberg started Pulley in the second half of 2021 with the goal of helping people get permits for projects of all sizes faster. And not just a little faster, but 10x faster. It’s a lofty claim, but if Pulley can well, pull that off, it could be revolutionary for the construction industry, where time is very much money.
Jacobson and Rotenberg believe that permitting is slow and unpredictable “because it’s different everywhere.” The pair say that there are more than 19,000 different permitting jurisdictions in the U.S., each with their own process for interpreting and enforcing 10,000 pages of building codes. Pulley was built on the premise that these processes “are poorly documented, run via legacy software, and often change without notice.”
What some people may not realize is that delays in construction permits are contributing to very large national problems such as the housing shortage, which in turn leads to higher housing costs for all. On top of that, the need to retrofit existing buildings is increasingly crucial toward efforts to combat climate change.
construction permitting process
