Louise Foody, Kingspan’s director of digital and brand. Image: Denise Cannon
Kingspan fosters ambition to digitise the entire construction industry.
Irish-headquartered building materials company Kingspan has invested $10m (€8m) in Invicara, a cloud software player focused on the building information modelling (BIM) ecosystem.
This is part of Kingspan’s ambition to develop technologies to digitise the construction industry.
‘For manufacturers of building systems and solutions, digitalisation enabled by technologies like BIM is a game-changer’
– LOUISE FOODY
Michigan-headquartered Invicara, which also has offices in Dublin, has developed solutions that integrate with BIM technology.
BIM provides detailed digital representations of buildings, allowing time- and cost-saving collaboration between partners on construction projects such as architects, engineers, contractors and owners.
Working with Kingspan, Invicara will use its cloud-based platform to build a new solution that uses design and construction data to create new digital workflows that transform the customer experience.
Build it and they will come
Kingspan is investing $10m in a minority stake in Invicara. Louise Foody, Kingspan’s director of digital and brand, and Mike Stenson, head of innovation at Kingspan, will join the Invicara board of directors.
“For manufacturers of building systems and solutions, digitalisation enabled by technologies like BIM is a game-changer,” Foody said.
“At Kingspan, we aim to leverage digital technologies to further align our offerings with our customer’s needs and more efficiently collaborate with owners, designers and contractors at every stage of the building life cycle.”
Invicara currently provides a cloud-based data management solution that helps owners and their design and construction partners to create a data-rich digital twin of a building, leveraging BIM.
BIM Assure, the first product built on the Invicara platform, allows owners to access, validate and report on model data. The product is currently in use on key projects in North America, Ireland, the UK, Australia and Singapore. Invicara is rapidly expanding this solution with significant new capabilities planned for release in 2018.
For example, BIM Assure is used by private- and public-sector development firms Ballymore and Grangegorman Development Agency, as well as property investment funds IPUT in Ireland and Ascendas in Singapore. It is also used in healthcare projects such as the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco and Seattle Children’s Hospital, infrastructure projects such as San Francisco International Airport, and campus developments such as Trinity College Dublin.
“Our relationship with Kingspan opens a new market opportunity for Invicara, providing us with deep context to build powerful solutions on the Invicara platform, enabling product manufacturers to participate in the digitalisation of construction,” said Anand Mecheri, CEO and founder of Invicara.
“From the start, Invicara’s vision has been to improve the value derived from BIM for the entire ecosystem of the built environment, providing an efficient flow of reliable data for a wide range of workflows.”
