Mooven, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) construction tech platform that provides insights and situational awareness around traffic conditions, helping them to save time money, reduce traffic disruption and work more efficiently, has established a beachhead in North America and is building distribution and a customer base here.
Mooven technology is designed to help contractors and others involved in transportation construction projects deal with political and logistical fallout from road construction by reducing time motorists spend stuck in construction-related traffic, automating detours, analyzing risk of closure and layout options, baselining traffic behavior, all in order to improve traffic modelling and planning, so road and infrastructure contractors can deliver better projects faster with less inconvenience for the community.
For contractors involved in major roadway projects, Mooven is designed to help:
- Deal with restricted working conditions in situations where they cannot start at the time they want due to traffic
- Manage the disruptions caused by traffic on roadwork sites
- Document and manage safety impacts caused by the speed of vehicles
- Use real-time data to communicate about traffic delays with high-profile stake holders and the media, pinning them down to a specific cause
Mooven on the North America Roadbuilding Market
Mooven, which has historically been based in New Zealand, and is venture funded with $5.3 million raised in two rounds, the most recently in June of 2021. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) product is now used by contractors, road asset owners and consultants in multiple countries. With a recent relocation to San Francisco from Auckland, Mooven CEO Micah Gabriels aims to build out the company’s customer footprint in North America. Founded in 2017, the company currently employs 20, going to market primarily through an internal sales force and keeping existing customers happy through a team of two customer success managers.
“We are committed to executing in North America,” Gabriels told ForConstructionPros in a recent debriefing session. “Construction is politically challenged here, and we have the tools to help contractors deal with the fallout of their projects in the community. With the passage of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, we see increased demand for our technology here. We also want to get in on the market in the United Kingdom and Europe.”
But apart from geographic expansion, Mooven is working to evolve from its documented ability to drive efficiencies and traffic flow improvements on individual projects to a more holistic and program-centric approach.
“What Mooven has done is manage delivery of individual projects,” Gabriels said. “What our real intent though is getting more delivery out of the same budget. The ultimate goal is to get 20 percent more infrastructure delivered for budget. We do this by enabling construction to work in harmony with the project surroundings while disrupting public less.”
Pricing and Market
Mooven is a fit for a broad swath of roadbuilding and infrastructure stakeholders from the lead contractor to state, local or federal entities. The technology is viable for midsized projects on up, starting at $5 million to $10 million up to hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Due to its focus on avoiding traffic-related schedule impacts and reducing disruption for drivers, it is a better fit for repair, resurfacing, utility work, widening and other projects on existing roadways than greenfield road or highway projects.
Mooven currently has about 50 customers, but at the time of the debriefing in April of 2022 had none in North America. There may not be much direct format competition as they work to secure their initial North American customers, however.
“The biggest thing we come up against is people just working the way they are used to with manual processes,” Gabriels said. “We will wind up competing mostly with engineering firms that get paid to build models. We also see some attempts to address these problems with hardware—bluetooth sensors and cameras—but that functions as a barrier between the data and the outcome. We win because we can prove what is really happening—there is no arguing about which solutions are best.”
Pricing is on an annual subscription, with tired levels of service that include:
- Performance Monitoring, which records data on journey time and delay monitoring as an entry level
- Project Optimization, which adds capabilities to structure work performed around roadway conditions, send SMS alerts regarding unplanned events impacting the project and capabilities to ingest count data from environmental sensors
- Disruption Management, adding to lower tiers tools for monitor and manage disruption beyond work site boundaries and to optimize and measure performance of detour options
- Full Stewardship is the Cadillac option, and adds continuous live monitoring and proprietary insights to improve asset management
Mooven Tech Stack
Mooven is provisioned on Amazon Web Services (AWS) through availability zones throughout its service area. It captures crowdsourced traffic data from sources like Tomtom or data on noise or dust and puts it into decision-making framework.
“What our tech does is take in a range of data sets, and gives it sufficient context so the delivery team can make a decision,” Gabriels said. “It solves the problem of slow collection and the resulting feedback loop … maybe the data in real time show that your crews can start work an hour earlier than you had anticipated based on historical traffic data sets. WE just help project leadership understand how busy roads are, when can they start and finish. This can lead to benefits as we send notifications to the customer, telling them when something needs their attention. We want to free the teams up so they can spend more time working.”
Mooven does not do this as an island. The software interfaces with job management tools to gather data on what crews are at which locations on a project. It also according to Gabriels can interface with asset management tools to inform decisions on when different roadway assets require maintenance.
“We have some standard integrations in the works,” Gabriels said. “We are feeding this information for a couple of our clients, but this is not standard yet. But then again this will be hard as a lot of contractors don’t use a lot of standardization even in the same company different geographic areas.”
