When Eric Wu was the CEO of Opendoor, a startup that popularized instant cash offers to homeowners, Opendoor was purchasing roughly 5,000 homes a month. Managing that massive volume required an expansive network of over 10,000 subcontractors and tradespeople, and despite spending about $750 million annually on home renovations, there was constant pain over quality control.

"I didn't know if a solution would be possible, but it just felt like there was so much inefficiency," Wu recalls of his time managing these sprawling real estate operations.

His new company, NavigateAI, is his attempt to attack that mess from the job site up. The startup has raised $25 million in seed funding at a $225 million valuation to build what Wu describes as an expert AI coach for construction workers. Investor Elad Gil led the round, with participation from venture capital fund Khosla Ventures and prominent real estate developers Lennar and Tishman Speyer.

NavigateAI targets the $2.2 trillion spent annually on U.S. construction projects, an industry currently crippled by a severe, compounding labor crisis.

"We have a shortage of people: we're short 500,000 builders and that number is projected to increase to two million," Wu said.

The problem is not just headcount. Construction is also facing a skills gap, with new apprentices needing technical training before they can be useful, safe and code-compliant on a job site. To tackle this, NavigateAI is working with large corporate clients and launching alongside trade schools to integrate its AI into certification pipelines before workers ever step foot onto a job site .

Wu's path to AI founder follows a long career as a real estate technology entrepreneur. While studying economics at the University of Arizona, he purchased his first rental property using scholarship money, utilizing the rental income to cover his basic food and housing expenses. By the time he graduated in 2005, he had already amassed a portfolio of residential homes. This early entrepreneurial streak led to data-driven real estate startups like Rent Advisor, which raised $7.5 million before being sold, and Movity, a neighborhood data-visualization startup that was eventually acquired by Trulia.

Wu then co-founded Opendoor in 2014, which became one of the tech darlings of the pre-pandemic era when the company pioneered the so-called “iBuying” model. Opendoor relied on complex, automated pricing algorithms to buy single-family homes directly from consumers for cash, completely bypassing the traditional agent-and-listing process. It made its public debut via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in December 2020, at the time minting Wu a billionaire via his 6% stake in the firm, which closed its opening day of trading with a market value nearing $18 billion .

The iBuying economy has since undergone a major correction, as overall home sales transaction volume has decreased dramatically. In 2025, Opendoor posted a net loss of $1.3 billion as real estate transaction volumes softened nationwide.

After transitioning from Opendoor, Wu co-founded Brain Co in the summer of 2024 alongside Elad Gil and Jared Kushner, which aims to integrate AI systems into massive, legacy industrial sectors like healthcare, governments, and oil and gas. While Wu still serves on the board of Brain Co, it was during his months spent brainstorming inside Elad Gil's office that he came up with the idea for NavigateAI.

NavigateAI is designing an AI-native system tailored specifically for field workers, operating as an app on a smartphone. Workers can also access Navigate hands-free via Meta’s smart glasses, allowing the AI co-pilot to see exactly what the worker sees on the job. It can do things like offer field support, ensure quality control through verifying structural and regulatory compliance against local municipal codes and blueprints, and catch build defects during the work process rather than at final inspection. It also helps workers with on-demand technical knowledge, allowing field technicians to query complex code books, manufacturer manuals, and corporate playbooks with answers in seconds.

Wu said that NavigateAI will differentiate itself from general-purpose tools like ChatGPT by post-training its models directly on the unique guidelines, standards, and regulatory requirements of its clients.

"You can't ask ChatGPT today, 'is this in line with Lennar standards?' when you install something as a construction worker,” Wu said.