Jonah Levite explains why the firm is backing construction tech to cut waste, cost and delays
The construction industry has a productivity problem, and Hazelview Ventures is putting all bets on buildtech.
According to Jonah Levite, associate at Hazelview Ventures, the firm grew out of a recognition that construction and real estate technology still lag behind other industries in adoption. With Hazelview Investments running a $10 billion development pipeline, the venture arm was set up to back early-stage companies building tools that could be deployed across that value chain, whether as a user, a tester or a financial sponsor.
Levite noted that the fund's focus sits at the intersection of proptech, physical infrastructure and construction innovation, what Levite also defines as buildtech.
"Real estate technology, and especially construction technology, is not as widespread in terms of its adoption," Levite said. "And there's a lot of opportunity to increase the efficiency of the enterprise through adoption of innovation… It’s essentially anything that can help us build better, faster and more efficiently, differently and greener," he said.
For Levite, one of the clearest areas of deployment for buildtech is at the front end of the construction process, especially in estimating and design. He believes this is where companies can most easily introduce new tools and where the payoff can be immediate, particularly if technology helps teams identify problems early before they turn into costly delays or rework on large projects.
Levite also identifies modular construction as one area of buildtech that draws significant attention, particularly in Canada, but where the reality hasn't caught up to the promise. While he sees clear potential in the ability to build faster and more sustainably through manufacturing, he says the uptake depends on developers and project sponsors being willing to commit.
"It needs to make sense from a cost reduction perspective to see real uptake from the industry," he said. “There needs to be an alignment of financing models, developer buy-in and a number of use cases that can really prove the value at scale.”
He suggests that buildtech is gaining traction because construction involves so many moving parts. Even relatively straightforward projects require coordination between contractors, subcontractors, developers, architects, financiers and other stakeholders. That makes information flow a major pressure point, Levite suggests, noting tools that improve how project data is captured, updated and shared can make the process more efficient, while also opening the use of data that firms previously struggled to access or apply.
For Levite, the value of these tools comes down to three things: stronger productivity, better accuracy and less waste. He also points to the environmental burden tied to the built environment, suggesting that buildtech could help address emissions as well as inefficiency. Still, he makes clear that none of this matters unless the economics work. Any solution, in his view, has to deliver measurable value for the developers, builders and other sponsors paying for it.
“It's a well understood thing that construction productivity is low and we need to build better, we need to build faster. I think that buildtech provides an opportunity to address that,” he said. “Lagging productivity is a complicated problem, one that has many different stakeholders, but there's opportunities to drive additional efficiency, additional accuracy and reduce waste by buildtech and implementing it in your construction processes.”
Levite highlighted the environmental cost of the built environment, arguing that construction materials such as cement and concrete carry an outsized emissions burden globally. In his view, that creates another opening for buildtech: not just to improve speed or efficiency, but to reduce the sector’s environmental impact as well.
Still, he acknowledged the limits of that argument. However promising a solution may be on sustainability grounds, it still has to work commercially. For developers and other project sponsors, environmental gains alone are unlikely to be enough unless the technology also makes financial sense.
According to Levite, buildtech has moved beyond the experimental stage and is already being used in live projects, with adoption picking up pace. He believes companies are starting to see real benefits from new tools, even if the impact can take time to show up because construction projects unfold over long timelines.
He also suggests the commercial case is already there. While larger companies may be slower to adopt new systems, he sees buildtech as something the industry will eventually adopt. For construction firms and developers alike, the expectation is that these tools will improve efficiency and lower costs, and in more innovative markets that value is already being demonstrated.
To that end, Levite sees AI as a force multiplier for buildtech, both because it can speed up workflows and because it lowers the barriers to creating new software tools. He believes more products will come to market faster, giving companies more ways to tackle bottlenecks, reduce errors and solve operational problems with less overhead.
He also points to AI’s role inside specific applications. On the design side, he sees generative tools helping teams move faster and catch issues earlier, while on the automation side, he highlights robotics as a major area of opportunity, particularly systems that can understand the physical behaviour of machines and continuously improve how they perform tasks.
For Levite, that has implications not only for construction, but for other industrial sectors like manufacturing, shipbuilding and data center fabrication, where gains in robotic efficiency could materially raise output.
He expects one of the biggest near-term disruptions in buildtech to land on the design side of construction, especially across engineering service firms that still rely on billable-hour models.Levite believes AI-driven design tools will sharply increase efficiency and expand capacity, putting pressure on pricing across the sector and making traditional service models harder to sustain.
That's why he suggests firms will need to shift away from charging simply for time and move toward models that are more closely tied to outcomes.
"In the near term, that's going to have the most disruption," said Levite. "I think that teams need to adapt to that model and pay attention to design workflows because it's really going to speed up construction timelines and change the way that service-based businesses think about selling their services to their clients. Innovation is one lever you can pull to increase productivity. If that innovation can in any way shape or form address that lagging productivity in the construction industry, that could be a metric of success investors could look to.”
