Ardalan Khosrowpour

Founder & CEO OnsiteIQ

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ardalan Khosrowpour is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of OnsiteIQ, a New York construction intelligence platform built on an insight about who actually needs the data. Construction technology has generally sold to contractors, who already know what is happening on their sites. OnsiteIQ sells to the real estate owners, developers and investors funding the work, who do not — and whose exposure to a delay or a defect is financial and often invisible until it is expensive. The company sends its own capture specialists across the United States and Canada to walk clients’ active job sites weekly with 360-degree cameras, then runs computer vision over the imagery, maps it to floor plans and schedules, and returns progress tracking, risk flags and early delay indicators. Khosrowpour built the approach out of his PhD research at Virginia Tech on applying artificial intelligence and computer vision to the built environment, and founded the company in 2017 through Cornell Tech’s Runway Startup Postdoc Program.

Career Highlights

• Founded OnsiteIQ in 2017 out of the Runway Startup Postdoc Program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech, and has led it as Chief Executive Officer since.
• Raised a $4.5 million seed round and a $14 million Series B in October 2023 led by Vertical Venture Partners, with RET Ventures and Interplay participating.
• Built what the company reports as a database of roughly four billion construction images, one of the largest corpora of visual construction risk data in the industry.
• Redefined who buys construction documentation, selling progress and risk verification to capital rather than to contractors.
• Won a customer base of major owners and developers including Toll Brothers, Greystar, Kennedy Wilson, Crescent Communities, Continental Properties, Choice Hotels and Yum Brands.
• Worked around the obstacle that had stalled jobsite monitoring — fixed cameras are impractical on a site whose layout changes weekly, and raise privacy objections — by using recurring human-operated 360-degree capture walks instead.
• Earned a PhD in civil engineering at Virginia Tech researching artificial intelligence and computer vision in the built environment, and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Professional Journey

Khosrowpour’s doctoral work at Virginia Tech sat at the intersection of civil engineering and machine learning: how to apply artificial intelligence and computer vision to physical construction. That is a field with an obvious commercial application and a long history of failing to reach it, because construction sites are hostile to instrumentation in ways that laboratories are not.

He went to Cornell Tech as a Runway Startup Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — a programme designed to turn a researcher into a founder rather than to place them in a lab. The Runway curriculum pushed him into extended contact with people in the industry, and the constraint that emerged from those conversations became the product. As Khosrowpour put it, you generally cannot put cameras on a building construction site, because the site changes constantly and because the privacy concerns of the people working on it are real. Fixed instrumentation was not going to work.

OnsiteIQ’s answer, developed with CTO John Mollis, was to accept the constraint and send people instead. Trained capture specialists walk a site on a recurring schedule with 360-degree cameras, and the software stitches what they record into navigable panoramas automatically registered against the building’s floor plans. Early on the company described this as a 3D panograph. In its first year it had captured 3.5 million square feet and was piloting with New Line Structures on a 430,000-square-foot New York project.

The strategic move that defined the business came later: shifting the buyer. Contractors generally do not want more documentation of their own sites, but owners and lenders very much want independent verification of what they are paying for. OnsiteIQ repositioned as construction intelligence for real estate owners and investors, and the customer list moved accordingly — Toll Brothers, Greystar, Kennedy Wilson, Crescent Communities, Continental Properties, Choice Hotels, Yum Brands. The pitch became portfolio-level: not photographs of one building, but delay prediction across a whole development programme.

In October 2023 the company raised a $14 million Series B led by Vertical Venture Partners, with RET Ventures and Interplay participating, on top of a $4.5 million seed. The accumulated image corpus, which OnsiteIQ now puts at around four billion images, is the compounding asset — the more sites the capture specialists walk, the better the models get at recognising what a fortnight of genuine progress looks like versus a fortnight of a project quietly slipping.

Education

Virginia Tech

Doctor of Philosophy, Civil Engineering, researching artificial intelligence and computer vision in the built environment

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Master of Science