When you talk to Zander Schweitzer, it’s immediately clear he’s someone who grew up surrounded by machines that move the earth. “I spent my fifth birthday in the back of a bulldozer at the Port of Brisbane,” he said. “Construction’s always been part of my life.”
Now on the cusp of finishing his civil engineering degree, Zander’s building something that could change how the industry itself works, Alloovium, a collaborative AI workspace for construction and heavy industry.
“It brings all your construction data and knowledge into one place,” he explained. “So you can build useful workflows and do your work more productively, to a higher standard.”
If that sounds overdue, it’s because it certainly is. Construction remains one of the most manual, fragmented industries around. “Data’s incredibly siloed,” Zander said. “Things change hour to hour. Drawings, specs, contracts. Professionals spend about 20% of their day just looking for information.”
As I chatted to Zander, the bigger picture became even more sobering. “The industry’s been in a productivity decline for fifty years,” he said. “Ten years ago, revenue per worker was about $950,000 a year. Now it’s around $350,000. Margins are shrinking, and inefficiency and rework are costing something like $1.8 trillion globally every year.”
That mix of frustration and fascination sent Zander down a rabbit hole that became Alloovium. “I love construction,” he said. “But I kept thinking, why am I doing all this admin? I’m a civil engineer, there’s got to be a better use of what I’ve learned.”
He started Alloovium at the beginning of Launch Club, just a few months ago. “At first it was just an idea,” he said. “I spoke to anyone who’d talk to me, people I worked with, people on LinkedIn. I think I sent six or seven hundred connection requests.” The pattern was consistent: everyone agreed the system was broken, but it had “always been done that way.”
So he built something to show what could be done instead. “I built a really scrappy MVP,” he said. “Pretty much hardcoded, just enough to demonstrate the concept.” The response came fast. “Someone at Multiplex told me, ‘If you can build that for real, we’d be interested.’ That was a big moment.”
From there, Zander kept iterating not in a sprint of rebuilds, but through small, deliberate tweaks. “I’d show someone a demo and they’d say, ‘Oh, you could use it for this.’ So I’d build that workflow and show it to the next person. It’s evolved like that.”
At its core, Alloovium acts as the connective tissue between all the knowledge scattered across construction projects. Think: drawings, scope documents, methods, spreadsheets. “A lot of a company’s IP just lives in people’s heads,” he said. “So Alloovium becomes the layer that brings it all together.”
The platform uses a fine-tuned large language model trained on a company’s own data. Users can query drawings or documents and even build custom workflows using simple natural language. One of Zander’s demos automates scope gap detection, meaning it identifies the small but costly oversights that can erase a project’s profit margin.
“It’s the kind of mistake that happens every day,” he said. “You upload the client’s scope, upload your subcontract packages, and Alloovium finds what’s missing. Eventually I want it to integrate with tools like Outlook and Word, so you can work directly from the same database while you write.”
Even in its early form, its pretty incredible. At the end of our chat, Zander gave us a taste of what AI could look like when applied to the gritty, high-stakes world of construction (and sheesh it’s awesome).
Launch Club (our eight-week pre-accelerator) he said, jumpstarted not just the product, but his own mindset. “Becoming a civil engineer has always been a stepping stone to business for me,” he said. “But being in Launch Club changed how I see risk. Most people think startups are reckless. Here, it’s more like informed risk you know. You validate, you test, you learn. It makes it feel achievable.”
He laughed when reflecting on the last two months. “I think I’ve just been doing more and thinking less. You learn from people who’ve done it before, and it gives you the confidence to move faster.”
Alloovium is still early, but the direction is so clear, finding a bridge between how construction works today and how it could work tomorrow.
Connect with Zander - he’s always open to connecting with other engineers, mentors and industry experts shaping the future of construction.
If you’d like to learn more, sign up for updates at Alloovium.com and follow Alloovium on Linkedin.
