When we led PermitFlow’s Seed round three years ago, Francis Thumpasery and Sam Lam had a clear vision: turn regulation into code and unlock more housing, faster. Today, PermitFlow is the leading AI workforce for construction, powering over $20 billion in construction value.

We are delighted to share that PermitFlow has raised a $54M Series B round led by Accel, alongside Kleiner Perkins, Altos, and Felicis. Initialized is proud to triple down on the team as they reshape the construction industry. 

THE ORIGIN

When PermitFlow was just an idea, Francis and Sam were obsessed with a single question: “Why is it so hard to build housing and infrastructure?”

Having known Francis since their undergraduate days, Abdul became a sounding board throughout Francis’ entrepreneurial journey. The two of them took a walk and looped around South Park, San Francisco’s oldest park. South Park had been rebuilt in mere months after the 1906 earthquake. Yet over a century later, the permitting system born from that disaster was still frozen in paper. Builders faced months—and sometimes years—of delays before a single shovel could break ground. Those delays were unpredictable costs that killed project financial viability and ultimately got passed to buyers and renters.

When Abdul brought the founders in to meet the team, Kim-Mai knew that this was the one. She had authored the original piece that kicked off the YIMBY movement, and then later served on the board of California YIMBY, which passed 30+ new laws enabling more housing. Over the years, she had seen hundreds of pitches claiming to fix housing but few approaches were positioned to be effective let alone a venture-scale business. PermitFlow was the rare exception. It was a business capable of applying software to the complexity of pre-construction, and it arrived at the right moment as local governments scrambled to move their processes online. 

Francis and Sam are unique in their ability to bring different worlds together. As a lead engineer at Uber, Sam built payments and reporting software that had to be localized to municipal fees and rules. But he also felt the pain of permitting firsthand. As a licensed real estate agent and restaurant entrepreneur, he’d lived through delays that kill deals and drain budgets. 

Francis spent years studying what makes great companies work at McKinsey, in private equity, and at hedge funds. He came to Silicon Valley with analytical rigor and a belief that the hardest problems were still waiting for technology. In the early days, that meant occasionally hauling paperwork into city hall. It meant walking away from easy revenue in order to build a stronger foundation. It meant building something no one had built before. 

THE $300 BILLION PROBLEM

LLMs unlocked a new set of possibilities that once required human judgment at every turn. PermitFlow seized the moment and has become the leading applied AI company for construction. Their AI agents automate permits, inspections, licensing, and more. Whether working with industry giants like Lennar and Toll Brothers, or multi-family developers, PermitFlow accelerates approvals for the homes and infrastructure we desperately need. 

At the same time, the bicoastal morass in housing production and construction points to a much more far-reaching problem (and market opportunity). We are witnessing a growing realization that the U.S.’s re-industrialization, energy independence, and the AI compute infrastructure all hinge on reducing bureaucratic blockers. You cannot build a solar farm without a permit. You cannot build a semiconductor plant without inspections. You cannot build a data center without licenses. PermitFlow is the infrastructure behind this country’s infrastructure. 

THE ROAD AHEAD

From our first check at the Seed stage to this Series B, the team has remained focused on a singular mission: bringing modern efficiency to the world’s builders. This team is proud of their craft, is innately ambitious, and solving problems at the heart of AI, policy, and physical infrastructure. If that sounds like you, join the team.