This AI startup gives builders a smarter path forward
With tools created by Ojonimi Bako ’04, contractors can follow shifting tasks and timelines before small snags become big setbacks.
Ojonimi Bako ’04, who majored in industrial engineering at Ohio State, has headquartered his startup, Kaya AI, in Columbus. (Photo by Corey Wilson)
The tangled threads of a large construction project are an excellent test of what humans can and can’t do. Highly trained and experienced project managers can corral the chaos, but Kaya AI, a company co-founded by Ojonimi Bako ’04, aims to give even the most expert professional a serious lift through the power of artificial intelligence.
Bako, who serves as the company’s CEO, learned firsthand about the challenges while helping out with family construction projects in Columbus. He also spent several years working to improve Walmart’s e-commerce business and noticed the difference between the experience of construction companies and the average consumer ordering something online.
For consumers, “Whether you’re shopping on Amazon or Walmart … whatever the site is, there’s a lot of intention put around making sure that experience is as frictionless as possible.” But in construction, where a lot more money is changing hands, “There’s so much friction you don’t even know where to start.”
As construction projects get more and more complicated, people aren’t great at tracking or predicting all the nuances, says Bako, a graduate of Ohio State’s industrial engineering program. How long, exactly, will a supply order take? When will a team of subcontractors be able to start, and how fast will they work when they do? How will the market and supply chain affect all this?
Important information gets lost as it is passed from hand to hand, says Mack Rush, a senior associate at Suffolk Technologies, an investor and advisor for Kaya AI. “You don’t find out until too late, and then next thing you know, the entire project starts to be impacted by something that could have been caught 10 months ago.”
Artificial intelligence is much better at crunching all the data and keeping track of everything to reduce that friction, Bako says. Rush recalls many hours processing mind-numbing paperwork. Kaya AI is “not going to eliminate all of it, but it is going to take some of those most mundane tasks and free people up to do the more meaningful aspects of their work, which will ultimately translate into better buildings being built faster.”
Kaya AI has touted promising results. Suffolk Construction, an industry partner of Suffolk Technologies, reported dramatic time savings, cutting procurement tracking efforts and improving lead-time accuracy.
Bako and co-founder Nicholas Selz chose the name Kaya after spending time in South Africa as they built the company. Kaya means “home” in Zulu, Bako says, “as in earth being our home and making sure that we’re fostering construction that is in harmony with humanity and the planet.”
The startup is now based in Columbus, where Bako spent part of his childhood. His family moved to the area from Northeast Ohio, and many of them ended up earning degrees from Ohio State. He values the broad foundation he built while studying industrial engineering, which exposed him to a wide variety of disciplines, such as the software programming that would later aid his career.
“It was a very formative time,” he says.
Earlier in his career, Bako became aware of the possibilities of AI for construction planning, but the applications were fairly basic. “And then all of a sudden, AI can do everything,” he says of the revolution that has taken place in recent years. It changed the scope of what they hoped to achieve.
Bako is optimistic that even more is possible: As AI continues to evolve, the potential for Kaya AI expands with it.
