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Planera - Why and Who are we

Industry Overview
Construction is a $1,400B industry in the US. It consists of 3.6 Million individual construction companies.
Construction industry is unlike software development - it works on the concept of fixed price bids. Contractors have to commit to a fixed price and a completion date. If they get either of those wrong, they are on the hook for overages that reduce profitability or in worst case bankrupt the firm. They do not have the luxury of changing the scope of work because things are taking longer than expected.
So obviously, project planning and good cost estimation techniques are core to this industry’s health and profitability. However, the tools in this industry are very primitive and not built to handle the complexity that firms face while trying to come up with an accurate project plan.
Planera Approach
Planera is building a SaaS app for the industry that will allow users to accomplish the following:
Create an accurate project plan using an interface that is modern and intuitive instead of old and clunky like
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Create a layer of collaboration to speed up project planning
Provide users the ability to analyze 1000s of scenarios in short time (not currently possible) and come up with the most accurate project plan and estimate in the industry.
Founder Backgrounds
This is a complicated project and needs expertise from various disciplines like Design, Software, Algorithms, Construction, Project Mgmt, etc. The Founders of Planera have deep expertise on all of these disciplines.
Nitin Bhandari - CEO
Nitin received MS in Electrical Engineering from Caltech. Nitin has Co-founded two software startups in the past. Skyfire was a pioneer in mobile video streaming and was
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Nitin stayed as SVP Products at Opera for a few years and then Co-founded another startup, Zenlabs
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which was later
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. Nitin has 15+ years of experience leading design and product management teams across many industries and is passionate about building delightful user experiences and products.
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Erik Swenson - CTO
Erik received Masters degree in Physics from San Jose State University and was the lead chip designer at
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when it was a small pre-IPO startup company. Erik was instrumental in Extreme Networks’ success leading to a great IPO in 1999 and beyond. Erik co-founded Skyfire which was a pioneer in mobile video streaming and was
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. Erik has more than 50 issued US patents and this is his 3rd startup.
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Saif Lodhi - Chief Industry Expert
Saif Lodhi received MS in Civil Engineering from US Berkeley and is Vice President of
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, a premier heavy civil engineering firm in California. Under his supervision, CEC has completed some of the most complex projects in the country like the demolition of the old bay bridge which is now a
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with a
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. Saif provides deep industry insight and ensures that the solution Planera builds will be totally disruptive in the industry and ready for hyper growth.
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