Bringing AI to an Overlooked $100 Billion Industry: Announcing Our Investment in Rebuild

Why we led the Series A in the company building the AI-native operating system for property restoration, starting with the single document that decides everything.

Asymmetric led the Series A in Rebuild, the New York-based company building the AI-native operating system for the property restoration industry.

The Industry that Insurance Built and Software Forgot

Property restoration, the industry that shows up after a pipe bursts or a fire rips through, is a $100 billion business in the US, and it still runs on paper. Close to a quarter of every dollar a restoration contractor earns gets consumed by back office work: estimating, documentation, accounting, and the software to hold it all together. Almost all of a contractor's revenue, on the order of 90%, ultimately gets paid out by a small number of large insurance carriers, each operating on its own hidden, carrier-specific approval rules. High back office burden, standardized inputs, and a concentrated set of counterparties who all speak a slightly different dialect: that combination is precisely the setup where an AI wedge earns its keep.

The estimate is the artifact that decides everything downstream: revenue, margin, and win rate on every job a contractor takes on. Own the estimate and the CRM, documentation, negotiation, and payments layers tend to follow. The incumbent standard, Xactimate, is the format the entire industry writes against and the one every carrier has approved. It is not a point solution to out-feature; it is closer to a protocol. The opportunity was never to replace it outright but rather to sit on top of it, make the front end faster and smarter, and own the workflow the incumbent never touched.

What Changes and Why Now

Three forces are converging on this industry at once. Disaster frequency keeps climbing, which keeps job volume high. Private equity has been rolling up the roughly 15,000 independent restoration businesses in the country, a number expected to shrink toward 10,000 by 2030, while major franchise networks keep growing their share of the market. Consolidation like that concentrates the buyer base into exactly the kind of large, sophisticated accounts a real platform needs to win, rather than thousands of mom-and-pop shops that each need to be sold one at a time.

Now, layer on top of that a genuinely new buying behavior. Contractors now search "AI restoration estimates" the way they once might have called a distributor rep, and Rebuild is the number one organic result on both Google and Claude for that search. That is not a small thing. Increasingly, being the answer to "AI for X" is the marketing budget, and seeing a company earning that spot organically, with no outbound sales motion at all, told us something real about product quality and category ownership.

Why Rebuild

Rebuild lets field estimators go paperless: what used to be a multi-day process of documenting storm and water damage now takes a few clicks before a compliant report goes out to a carrier like Chubb. The company has grown from a standing start about a year ago to real scale, including named accounts at ServiceMaster, Belfor, ServPro, PuroClean, and Core, entirely on inbound and referral demand, with no outbound sales team and a sales cycle measured in days rather than months. That is an unusually clean efficiency profile for a company this young, and it was built inside three of the largest restoration franchise networks in the country, exactly the accounts that industry consolidation says will matter most going forward.

The founders have lived this problem from both sides. CEO Alex Toporek grew up around a family restoration business and built his commercial instincts at 25madison and DoorDash. Co-founder John Reim and Head of Engineering Jack Walters spent their careers at Block, Zillow, and Meta. The rest of the team was pulled from the likes of Harvey, Datadog, and Whoop, exactly the mix of domain fluency and technical horsepower this business needs to move from a founder-led motion to the enterprise sales and carrier relationships its next stage requires.

Rebuild is our clearest example yet of why we built Asymmetric the way we did: a firm where our LPs are largely current and former operators who bring us deals we would never see otherwise. Asymmetric LP and close friend of the firm Lars Albright has built and sold companies twice over, to Apple and to Mastercard. He brought Rebuild to us and will take a board seat this fall to represent Asymmetric. That is the kind of hands-on conviction from the people around this firm that compounds over time, in ways a cap table alone never shows.

What We Look For

Rebuild fits a pattern we keep coming back to: an enormous, non-discretionary market that technology ignored because it was unglamorous and full of paperwork; a structural shift, in this instance industry consolidation and a new AI-native buying behavior, that makes this the moment; a wedge with a clean, measurable ROI story from day one; and a customer relationship built on displacing a hard cost, not promising a soft productivity gain.

The Opportunity Ahead

The estimate is the beachhead, not the destination. From there, Rebuild's roadmap runs through job routing, documentation, negotiation, and eventually payments, each layer sitting on top of the workflow the estimate already owns. We expect this round to fund the shift from a founder-led inbound motion to a sales organization built to win the largest networks in the industry, and to extend Rebuild's lead as the answer contractors find when they go looking for a better way to do this work.

We are thrilled to partner with Alex, John, Jack, and the whole Rebuild team, and grateful to Lars for bringing this one to us and for stepping onto the board on our behalf.

Learn more at rebuild.work.

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The views expressed here are those of the Asymmetric investment team and are for informational purposes only.

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