JE Dunn leads $5M round in a local, ‘skunkworks’ tech spinout

One of Kansas City’s top corporations has led a $5 million investment round in a local tech firm that helps manage the torrents of paperwork associated with building maintenance and management.

Kansas City-based JE Dunn led the Series A round in Site 1001, a software company that spun out of the construction giant to digitize and automate facilities maintenance and management. Kansas City-area based funds Flyover Capital, Tifec and Ward Ventures also were apart of the investment round, which will go toward building Site 1001’s engineering, sales and marketing efforts.

“Site 1001 bridges the gap between the old hodge-podge of paper and PC-based facilities management systems of the past 30 to 50 years, and the hyper-connected and automated ‘smart’ building systems of tomorrow,” Site 1001 CEO Cleve Adams said in a release. “By bringing all that legacy information in, combining it with the real time information connected building controls generate, and putting it all in the hand of the person who needs it when and where he needs it, we can dramatically reduce operational costs and extend the life of the building.”

The Site 1001 system simplifies work for facility managers, who often must rely on binders of paperwork and a variety of software tools to conduct maintenance or other tasks. It was also built with old and new building management systems in mind — such as building automation, energy management, internet of things, analytics and other connected systems for smart buildings and cities.

With the cloud-based product, those systems are aggregated into a mobile app for the building manager, allowing her to scan a particular room’s code with the app to pull up facility information, such as structural and mechanical drawings to a building’s carpet and light bulbs. App users can also create task lists, log service, issue work orders and manage various IoT devices within a facility.

Site 1001 CTO Eric Hall originally developed the idea — described as a “skunkworks” project — while he was a vice president at JE Dunn, according to a release. Hall created Site 1001 in response to frustrations with the information handoff between a builder and the building owner.

“As a construction company we used … enterprise tools like resource planning and building information modeling to track every detail of what went into the building — from the $6 million chiller on the roof to the $2 electrical outlet in the basement supply room,” Hall said in a release. “But those systems are extremely expensive and difficult, so very few on the building operations side use them.”

Adams said that in the next few years, smart building tech trends will be mainstream, positioning the firm for sustained success.  

“Building automation, analytics and smart management will be key to reducing costs, increasing efficiency and extending the life of buildings and building ecosystems by 20 percent or more,” he said in a release. “In a couple of years it will be no big deal that a light bulb can request its own work order to be replaced, and it will be Site 1001 that is there to accept the work order and notify the nearest facilities manager to complete it.”

Site 1001 was founded in 2016 and employs less than 10 people, according to its LinkedIn page. The company’s reports that its headquarters are located at 1001 Locust Street, Kansas City, Mo., which is also JE Dunn’s headquarters.