Construction is all around us – be this a neighbour having a house renovation, or a brand-new block of flats being put up in a local town. In spite of its ubiquity, there lurks a “dark underbelly” which hides the cost of raw material consumption, material waste, and inefficiencies inherent in the construction sector.
This is according to two people who are thinking deeply about how to solve real-world problems on the ground: Brittany Harris, Co-Founder and CEO, and Jade Cohen, Co-Founder and CPO of Qualis Flow (‘Qflow’).
Construction is inherently wasteful
Qflow was established in May 2018 following Harris and Cohen meeting while they volunteered for a charity, World Merit, focusing specifically on working on clean water and sanitation. They decided they wanted to pivot to “profit with a purpose”, said Harris.
Harris began her career as a civil engineer, while Cohen had expertise in the environmental compliance space, complementary skills that lend themselves well to what Qflow is tackling today.
Although construction may be familiar to the public in the many forms it takes, people don’t necessarily have an understanding of what the industry faces.
“It [the construction industry] consumes about 40% of the world’s raw resources, which is the biggest single consumer, but it’s also one of the most wasteful,” stressed Harris. “It contributes about 40% of waste to landfill. But it flies under the radar.”
A major problem is materials management. A construction site may order X amount of timber and end up not needing it all. Or the project could change and the timber is no longer used. But that material is not reused or passed on. It gets wasted and thrown in landfill.
Therein lies the problem: “It’s not just that it consumes so much material. It’s also that it doesn’t have to,” said Harris.
While public perception of construction may not be that well-versed in these intrinsic issues, those in the industry also may not have an appreciation of the scale of impact, Harris added.
She cited three core contributing factors: construction sites are neither controlled nor standardised, the industry is not especially tech-literate, and risk aversion is baked in, because the stakes are especially high: when things aren’t built properly, people could lose their lives.
“When I was training as a civil engineer, it was very much drilled into us that if you designed something wrong, you would not kill just one person … you’re killing thousands potentially,” explained Harris. “The industry engineers in factors of safety, so in geotechnical engineering, you design most things by three. So you go, ‘right, I’m going to design for this, and then I’m going to design it three times bigger, just to make sure it doesn’t fall over because I’m so scared of killing someone.
“That introduces huge inefficiencies and environmental impacts.”
Putting the tools in the hands of engineers
While some people have tried to translate manufacturing principles into construction to help with these challenges, they haven’t always worked. Manufacturing differs from construction in that it is a controlled environment where variables can be monitored.
“There’s this perception that construction and civil engineering is remarkably precise,” shared Cohen. “And everyone knows it’s complete and utter chaos on site.”
Where Qflow comes in is providing civil engineers and constructors with the tools they need to capture data from documentation in the form of its software. This means that these sites have a clear and concise view of, for example, the materials that it expects to receive. This ultimately avoids the wastage of materials.
“It [Qflow software] starts to put some hard numbers around the scale of that impact, but also the scale of the opportunity if they were to improve their materials management,” said Harris. “What we’re starting to do now is provide them with the actionable insights so they actually can start making those changes.”
This is a win-win for construction sites who not only cut back on their waste but save themselves time and money.
“On the surface, it seems like that should already be available,” said Cohen. “To the point of this misconception (that civil engineering is precise), we think that everything’s done very holistically and with precision [in construction]. This is one of those instances where there is a lot [of] flying blind in construction.”
Because of the existing tech literacy of the industry being a constraint, the first thing they had in mind when founding Qflow was that the software had to be easy to use from the get go.
Where technologists had come in and tried to apply their mindset to what solutions could work, they had failed, because they hadn’t appreciated the people that would be using their products.
“The industry gets very frustrated, and they say, ‘oh, technology doesn’t get us. Technology sucks. Let’s ignore technology’,” said Harris. “So we’ve taken the completely opposite standpoint and said, ‘let’s really understand the people first, understand what it is they need, the level of tech literacy they have today, and how we can work with that’.”
One example of this can be seen in how the data is captured. Rather than getting someone to manually enter it in – a more time-consuming process – a photograph can be taken, and it will be recorded by the software.
“Ultimately what we found was the threshold that we could get people to meet was, can you take a selfie?” Harris shared. “If we could get them to meet that tech literacy threshold, then we were good.”
Highlights
The highlights for Harris and Cohen have been customer validations – proving that their product not only works, but that there is a sore need for it – continually tuning into the customer pain points and avoiding outside noise and seeing the reduction of carbon impact thanks to the work they’re doing.
“We make a big effort to quantify the carbon emissions that we’re helping the industry to either avoid or save in some fashion,” said Cohen. “We recently calculated that we surpassed over a quarter of a million carbon emissions avoided.
“For a company like ours, where our overall carbon footprint is something in the bare hundreds of tonnes of carbon equivalent … the orders of magnitude of impact that we have, versus what we’re emitting as a company, is massive.”
The main learnings for the two of them as founders has been to make it all about the people and the platform benefits, to take both the highs and lows as they come, and to recognise the role of a leader is different to that of a contributor.
“It’s important to make sure that we evolve as a business,” concluded Cohen.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe
