CEMEX announced today that CEMEX Ventures, its corporate venture capital and open innovation unit, is investing in ObraLink, a startup that has developed a forecasting technology that monitors concrete during its pouring and hardening to predict its strength in real-time during the construction process.
ObraLink, founded in Chile, developed a technology that monitors the hardening process of concrete at the jobsite. Through advanced thermal imaging, this technology can monitor up to three times more measurement points than similar sensors at a fraction of the cost. With exact and real-time information of the concrete hardening process, builders can remove the formwork, or moulds, at precisely the right moment. This can reduce a project’s structural costs by 15% and decrease formwork removal times by 40%.
This solution’s advanced imaging capabilities also reduce time, as manually monitoring this process is more time-consuming. The easy-to-use integrated platform can also automate daily tasks, support workers’ performance with little human intervention, and allow its customers to include additional features via APIs.
Alongside CEMEX Go and Arkik, ObraLink allows for an optimised construction value chain with better visibility, decision-making, and enhanced quality control for industry professionals.
After a successful trial, CEMEX tested ObraLink with a group of clients in Mexico during an initial launch phase. Subsequently, the companies look to expand their services in the country while studying opportunities to grow into other markets in the U.S. and Latin America.
“As pioneers in the construction industry’s digital transformation, our mission is to seek innovative solutions that help boost productivity and efficiency. ObraLink’s scalable technology is a perfect fit with CEMEX’s service offering, as it digitalises a currently manual process, improving both the efficiency of execution and completion time of a project. We look forward to working with them to further scale and develop the solution so we can deliver a superior customer experience enabled by digital technologies,” said Gonzalo Galindo, Head of CEMEX Ventures.
ObraLink was named one of the Top 50 ConTech Startups of 2021 in CEMEX Ventures’ annual list and was declared a winner in the same year’s Construction Startup Competition.
