Join, a decision-making platform for architecture, engineering and construction, today closed a $16 million Series A round led by SignalFire with participation from Ironspring Ventures, Metaprop, Building Ventures and Standard Investments. The fresh capital, which brings the company's total raised to $30 million, will be put toward "doubling down" on market expansion and expanding Join's product, according to CEO Andrew Zukoski.

Join was launched in 2017. Zukoski, Drew Wolpert, Jim Forester, Ye Wang and the rest of the founding team met through Flux Factory, a spinout of Google's experimental product lab, X (formerly Google X), where they developed technology that tracks and documents building construction decisions. Flux was the first company to spring out of X in 2014, but was mired in controversy when an architect sued both Flux and Google for allegedly stealing his ideas for architecture design software.

Zukoski hopes Join will have a quieter profile. "We envision a world in which teams are powered by trust and buildings are built on confidence," he told TechCrunch via email. "General contractors have to win work, plan it and then execute it. One in 10 projects is a financial disaster for general contractors. They have good systems for tracking and controlling execution. However, these systems don’t give them any visibility into the earlier phases, which have become more and more critical with the shift to collaborative delivery methods."

Zukoski positions Join as a replacement for the Excel and other email-based workflows that many construction stakeholders use to make decisions about projects. Most of the risk management for projects happens during the early phases, known as "pre-construction." But it often takes place across disparate spreadsheets, leading to disjointed communications.

Join takes data from Excel and other estimating tools and provides an ostensibly easier way to assess the impact of pre-construction decisions. For example, with Join, a user can ask "what if" questions and see the cost impact of an option in real time.