Dependbuild, the St. John's maker of cloud software to help municipalities and infrastructure developers assess risks to construction projects, is launching its beta test.

Founded in spring of 2021,  dependbuild has already been piloting its technology with several customers, and the beta test marks its first foray into commercialization.

Chief Executive Conor O’Brien and COO Jean-Samuel Poirier are targeting municipal governments as their beachhead market, along with American county governments, with private developers to come later.

So far, their five-person team has worked with cities of a range of sizes, including several large, U.S. urban centres. But the “sweet spot” for dependbuild’s technology to be maximally useful appears to be centres of up to about 30,000 to 100,000 people, added Poirier. 

“We help municipalities identify and automatically assess certain risks,” he said in an interview. “So those risks could be anything from stakeholder risk, to environmental risk, process risk, anything that can negatively affect project outcomes.”

O’Brien said dependbuild is treating its beta test as a full product launch, from a commercial perspective. The company was also recently accepted into accelerator Creative Destruction Lab’s Digital Society stream in Estonia.

As an example of how dependbuild functions, Poirier described the process by which the software assesses stakeholder risk by comparing a city’s actions to best practices.

“At a high level, what we’re doing is making sure that best practices have been followed to identify stakeholders, making sure that stakeholder values have been included in the product design and project decision,” he said, referring to entities such as municipal constituencies, Indigenous groups and corporations.

“It is making sure the right processes have been followed … essentially by listening to stakeholders.”

Another example, he added, is dependbuild’s capacity to identify likely information silos on a project and suggest ways to mitigate them.

“Tool-wise, the data that we’re pulling is the municipalities’, just because its readily available and open-source,” said O’Brien.

One customer dependbuild recently worked with was Indian Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador — a tiny community of just 175 people. The town had previously struggled with communicating with contractors, with the scope of already-underway projects often changing without council’s sign off. 

Dependbuild was hired to reduce the risk of unforeseen obstacles leading to the project’s scope needing to be expanded, as well as to facilitate better oversight of the project.

“I was able to look at what information I received in the context of the project as a whole and go, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know we were supposed to see if they had this kind of insurance,’ or that communication channels with certain stakeholders should be opened to remove reliance on the engineer,” said Indian Bay’s chief administrative officer, Triffie Parsons.

“The platform allowed me to be more watchful of progress on the project.”

O’Brien and Poirier are in the process of raising a US$1 million funding round, having previously bagged about $200,000 of backing from angel investors, with plans to hire more staff once the raise closes.