Image: Dall-e (using AI)

Great business ideas come in all sorts of places, but for business management student David Plaseller, his inspiration came at the bottom of a skip.

The young Austrian entrepreneur was helping renovate a hotel in Italy which his family had taken over and wanted to keep costs down by using secondhand building materials.

Plaseller made a tour of nearby building sites and befriended the demolition workers on site. He found that when he told them of his project, he was frequently able to acquire used materials, fixtures and fittings which would otherwise have gone into landfill 鈥� saving himself some money and the contractors the time and effort of disposing of them.

鈥淲e didn鈥檛 have the money to buy everything new. So, we went to other construction sites with our craftsmen and dismantled building materials there and brought them back to us and renovated the rooms and lobby with reused materials,鈥� Plaseller laughs.

鈥淪ome examples were furniture, ceilings, lighting systems, doors and beds. The advantage was that we were able to renovate the building free of charge, so to speak.鈥�

The experience got Plaseller thinking. How could such a system be digitalised so that others could go about doing the same thing on a bigger scale?

How can AI be used to catalogue building materials?

The answer he came up with was to create a tech platform capable of linking up anyone attempting to get rid of used construction materials with those looking to acquire them 鈥� either builders looking for recycled materials for use in a new project like Plaseller鈥檚 hotel or building materials suppliers and manufacturers looking to add recycled products into their offerings.

Together with software engineer Patrick G枚ssel, a fellow student at Management Centre Innsbruck, Plaseller set up Revitalyze. The business comprises two parts: an app where potential customers can record all of the details of the materials contained in their buildings; and a white label portal where customers can order materials directly from each other via webapp.

鈥淚n Germany alone, more than 14,000 buildings are demolished every year using valuable raw materials that often end up in landfill. Only in very few cases is the resource potential fully exploited,鈥� Plaseller says. 鈥淲e want to change this by using our web app to record building materials before demolition and broker them in our network.鈥�

鈥淲e wanted to make material flows visible and tradable,鈥� Plaseller says. 鈥淎s our customer, you can create a product - recycled or new aggregates - in little time and link the product to a production plant or a construction site. Your customers can order the material directly in bulk via webapp. By doing so, we create a unique database of all orders.鈥�

But how do those sales process work in practice? How does anyone about to demolish a sizeable building even begin to find out, let alone document, all of the things it is made out of and decide whether any of them could be salvaged and sold?

David Plaseller, CEO and co-founder of Revitalyze. Photo: Revitalyze

Plaseller says that although many experienced demolition contractors have salvaged high value materials for resale for many years, AI is making it quicker and easier to analyse the fabric of buildings 鈥� and then to advertise the stuff to a wider number of potential buyers.

As such, sellers are encouraged to upload as much data as possible about their building so that the Revitalyze AI tools can crunch the numbers and (hopefully) find a market for them.

鈥淭o understand what materials are contained in a building, we analyse all kinds of data we receive,鈥� Plaseller says. 鈥淭his can be drawings, photos, material assessments, tenders, procurement logs or bills of quantities. We are able to analyse both text and photos, but currently the focus is on text information.鈥�

鈥淲e catalogue the building as it is, at a high level of detail. This means that we mainly analyse the amount of concrete, bricks, wood and steel in tonnes,鈥� he adds. 鈥淭his information is relevant for recycling purposes to decide where to recycle (on site or in a plant) and which recycled material can be used in what quantity in another construction project. So basically, we estimate the recycling potential of the building based on previous data.鈥�

The company says that as well as helping to reduce the cost of building materials, lower emissions and prevent waste, registering with Revitalyze or other similar platforms may help construction contractors win project bids with public bodies or large corporations.

Other AI-empowered circular waste management platforms currently include; Prague-based Cyrkl, Berlin-based Concular, and Amsterdam-based Excess Materials Exchange.

Cemex Ventures winner

Since officially launching the business in February 2024, the company has been named as one of the eight finalists of the Cemex Ventures construction technology startup competition and won the Joseph Umdasch Research Prize for research and development.

The company has also received funding from TUM Venture Labs, part of the Technical Institute Munich and Austrian Wirtschaftsservice, the Austrian government鈥檚 development bank. Eventually it hopes to make money by charging a brokerage fee on all materials traded through the webapp.

But Plaseller says this is only the beginning for the company which is currently searching for new ways to streamline and digitise the scouting process for circular building materials.

鈥淭he potential of analysing unstructured data from various documents in the construction industry, automatically creating material lists and matching supply and demand with the power of LLM is enormous,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 think, we haven鈥檛 reached yet the full potential of GenAI in construction. There is still a lot to discover.鈥�