Autodesk Forge Fund Invests in Rhumbix

The Forge Fund has invested in the productivity-tracking platform, its sixth such investment of the year, to give its customers greater choice in creating their own management solutions.

A sample screen from Rhumbix. The software company recently received an undisclosed investment from the Autodesk Forge Fund. (Image courtesy of Rhumbix.)

A sample screen from Rhumbix. The software company recently received an undisclosed investment from the Autodesk Forge Fund. (Image courtesy of Rhumbix.)

Productivity-tracking platform Rhumbix recently closed an $8 million funding round, led by the Autodesk Forge Fund. It’s the fund’s sixth such investment in the last year, as it continues its mission to unite designers and engineers under the Autodesk umbrella.

Rhumbix is a mobile platform designed to help smaller construction companies manage and track data without using paperwork. Its Field Intelligence Platform allows on-site professionals to easily input things like hours worked, production tracking and field work orders. The data can be viewed immediately in the web app, giving stakeholders up-to-date data on factors driving productivity and production. According to company COO and cofounder Drew DeWalt, “select users are seeing a 5 to 10 percent improvement in labor productivity, which results in a 200 to 300 percent increase in profitability.”

The collaboration is the result of Autodesk Forge, a developer cloud platform that lets customers create their own scalable solutions to manage engineering, construction and manufacturing companies. To that end, Forge is investing in companies to get them connected to the Forge platform, which provides customers with greater choice in the software they use. According to the Forge homepage, it’s looking for companies that use Autodesk Cloud APIs, have an excellent management team, and are “disrupting the market” in terms of how things are designed or made.

Forge’s Rhumbix investment comes on the heels of its investment in subcontractor-focused company eSub. According to Jim Lynch, Autodesk’s VP and general manager for construction, the company’s interest in Rhumbix was driven by its remarkable results: “Rhumbix is proven to increase labor productivity and profitability, which is exactly the type of results we seek to pass along to our existing and future construction customers.”

Rhumbix management hopes that the collaboration will drive higher productivity throughout the industry. “For the construction industry to fully realize the benefits of digitization, field data needs to feed into a common data platform where it can be united with all aspects of project and building information modeling data,” said Zach Scheel, CEO and cofounder of Rhumbix, in a company press release. “This collaboration allows Rhumbix’s industry-leading field data and labor productivity platform with Autodesk BIM 360 laying the foundation for unprecedented levels of insight into project performance and cost controls.”