How does a telecom, retailer, or utility company keep tabs on multimonth projects spanning dozens or thousands of sites? It’s challenging enough as is, and more so if the company in question is among the 77% that don’t use standardized, cross-division management practices.
Sitetracker, a Palo Alto-based project and asset management startup founded by Timothy May and Brett Cupta, aims to help. Since 2014, it has provided site and project management to telecommunications, utilities, smart cities, media, retail, and renewable energy brands. And after a successful run in which it accelerated site cycles by 3 times and reduced manual reporting activity by 80%, it’s gearing up for growth.
Sitetracker today announced that it has raised $10 million in funding from Energize Ventures in an extension to the $24 million series B round that closed in August 2018. CEO Giuseppe Incitti said the funds will be used shore up Sitetracker’s development roadmap and bolster its customer success efforts.
“We’re excited to have Energize Ventures as a partner. Their investment represents continued validation that critical infrastructure operators are ready and need to tackle the challenges being presented by a shifting technological landscape,” said Incitti. “Our focus from here continues to be … deliver[ing] above and beyond … expectations.”
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As Incitti explained, Sitetracker’s software can improve utilities’ wildfire and grid maintenance activities by improving first-time fix rates, creating automated maintenance schedules, matching people’s skills with job needs, and dispatching crews to the right site at the right time. It also helps utilities manage increasing volumes of distributed energy resource interconnections, like residential solar installations.
The suite delivers automated reporting and forecasting with tools that estimate staffing needs and bottlenecks, compare project timelines with historical performance, and track expenses and revenues through cloud dashboards. Scheduling, templating, and assignment modules expedite process optimization and facilitate the sharing of customizable density, zoning, and sales maps to customers, and site management components enable overseers to maintain awareness of maintenance tasks and time spent on these tasks.
Above: Managing sites and projects from within Sitetracker’s dashboards.
On the contractor side of the equation, workers can enter billable hours through Sitetracker’s cloud dashboard, either by selecting time periods and tasks completed or by importing tasks from a previous window. (These, along with notes about specific tasks, are submitted to approving managers.) The Sitetracker Mobile app is more robust, with built-in support for photo uploads, comments, project importing and recording viewing, configurable checklists, and real-time collaboration among workers.
“[W]e are seeing project managers spending more time managing and less time manipulating spreadsheets,” said May. “That’s even with 25% plus workload increases. Furthermore, vendors are billing and getting paid on time for work completed instead of experiencing months of delay.”
Sitetracker’s current clients include Alphabet, British Telecom, Fortis, Verizon, Google, Nokia, Tilson, Dominon Energy, Congruex, and Extenet, and the company claims the tens of thousands of people using its software manage over $19 billion assets in more than 1 million projects.
“Critical infrastructure providers are at a crossroad,” said Energize Ventures’ John Tough. “Hardware miniaturization and decentralization is leading to new revenue opportunities in energy, transportation, 5G, and cross-industry IoT. But these new opportunities also present unexpected deployment and maintenance challenges that need to be addressed now. By enabling this asset transition, Sitetracker aligns tightly with our thesis that technology can deliver solutions for problems that permeate not only power and energy companies, but critical infrastructure providers at large.”
Other Sitetracker investors include New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, National Grid Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
