Trubuild’s blueprint to build better

In a region where megaprojects dominate headlines — and delays dominate timelines — Bisrat Degefa and Dr. Sari Sabban launched Trubuild to fix one of the most persistent issues in the construction industry: inefficiency.

Before founding Trubuild, Bisrat had spent over 15 years inside some of the sector’s biggest players — leading digital transformation at Atkins and Gleeds, two global construction giants. That experience gave him a front-row seat to the systemic problems plaguing large-scale developments across the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

The takeaway? The problem isn’t talent — it’s structure. Poor planning, redundant workflows, legacy processes, and misaligned incentives are costing the industry billions.

Trubuild’s solution is deceptively simple: don’t just digitise existing problems — remove them entirely. The platform uses AI to streamline the pre-construction phase, focusing on scope alignment, tender evaluation, and eliminating the compounding issues that derail projects before they ever break ground.

On the back of Trubuild announcing a $1 million Seed round led by Wa’ed Ventures and Dar Ventures earlier this week, I sat down with Bisrat to talk about what makes construction tech such a tough sell, why most tools fail in the field, and what meaningful disruption actually looks like in one of the world’s most traditional industries.

We also unpacked Trubuild’s evolving GTM strategy, and how the startup is navigating long sales cycles, cultural resistance, and the hard business of earning trust in construction.

Let’s start with the problem you’re solving. The construction sector bleeds over $1.6 trillion annually — many startups have tried and failed to fix it. What, in your view, have others misunderstood about the root causes of delays and overruns? And what’s structurally different about TruBuild’s approach?

Just briefly on my background — I’ve worked globally as a Director at both Atkins and Gleeds, leading digital transformation across the Middle East, North America, and Europe. 

In both roles, I had a front-row seat to how projects are delivered across different markets — and I kept seeing the same issues pop up again and again. My job involved evaluating construction tech, implementing it, and, when needed, building custom tools from scratch. That gave me a clear view of what actually works — and what doesn’t.

A lot of what I saw in the market at the time felt… gimmicky. These were great-looking technologies — VR, flashy demos, polished pitch decks — but when we actually rolled them out to the teams on-site, they failed. Construction sites are messy. Teams were just transitioning from using Excel and Word. There was a massive disconnect between what these tools promised in a demo and what was needed on the ground.

So when I started Trubuild, I really wanted to avoid that. I didn’t want to build something flashy for the sake of it. It didn’t need to be sexy. It just needed to solve a real problem and actually be usable. And to do that, it had to fit into existing workflows — into the way construction teams already operate. It had to help them deliver what they’re contractually obliged to deliver. That was the core ethos behind Trubuild: stop with the gimmicks and start building tools that actually help people hit their deadlines.

Another thing — when we talk about delays and disputes, there are plenty of tools out there that kick in after construction has started. And some of them are great. I’m not knocking that. But by then, it’s already too late. A lot of the problems we see during construction stem from decisions made before a single thing gets built — in the planning stage.

So instead of building tools to clean up the mess, I wanted to go upstream and address the root cause. That’s why we focus so heavily on the pre-construction phase — helping teams prepare scopes of work properly, make better decisions on who to contract, and map out realistic, robust plans. That’s where you can really prevent delays and disputes from happening in the first place.