Frank and Cynthia Ciminelli believe technology can fundamentally change one of America's oldest industries. They're building Arc around that idea.
To hear Frank Ciminelli II describe a construction scene is to behold chaos, even to love it a little bit.
It’s an ad hoc factory that relies on disparate factors — people, companies, weather, supplies and luck. It’s camaraderie and coordination and often deeply tense.
Each construction site creates something new out of a blank canvas. Each site puts itself out of business.
And if someone delivers a crane two days early, and it thus has to sit like a massive inert giraffe in the midst of that chaos, then those are just the breaks.
Ciminelli has spent his career in leading construction companies, including Washington, D.C.-based Clark Construction, Hunt Construction in Cincinnati and then moving back to Buffalo to work in his family business, LPCiminell.
Nine years ago, he cofounded ARC (Advancing Revolutionary Construction), with his wife, Cynthia. The company has grown over the past nine years from eight employees and one project to 68 employees and roughly 20 projects in various stages (both Frank II and Cynthia are 43North Foundation Ambassadors).It’s a story of homegrown success and redemption. It’s all just the start of the story.
Another thing that Ciminelli talks about — has been talking about relentlessly for years, in fact — is the potential of technology to fundamentally change the construction business model.
Arc has spent the past few years focusing on the interplay between construction software — digital environments, operations tooling and AI — and a fast-moving construction environment historically inhospitable to tech.
Ciminelli can feel in his bones what could happen, what has to happen, what’s long overdue.
"Things need to change, and things are starting to evolve from a tech perspective that are going to prompt change,” he said.
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Arc has backed that belief with a series of investments.
It built a virtual design and construction team and adopted 3D modeling that allows projects to be coordinated before crews encounter problems in the field. It layered time into those models to simulate how construction will actually unfold. It adopted cloud-based project management, computer vision and AI-powered progress tracking that can compare what is happening on a jobsite with what was supposed to happen.
More recently, Arc created an internal R&D function, hired a full-time innovation and systems engineer and began experimenting with AI agents and an AI-enabled data environment.
The individual tools matter less than what Arc is trying to make them do together: replace some of construction’s educated guesswork with better information. That has required more than buying software.
Frank acknowledges resistance to digital modeling from Arc employees, owners, subcontractors and design teams. He knows that new tools in his industry have often merely created new problems. Project teams could be overwhelmed with data. New processes and work streams feel unnatural to on-the-ground workers. It can feel upfront like more work is being created, not less.
But technology adoption increasingly defines Arc’s strategy.
“You can’t just throw another tool at a project team and expect them to absorb it,” Ciminelli said. “You have to figure out the workflow, what information matters and how all these things fit together. The opportunity to stitch all of it together into a cohesive operating system that changes how we build.”
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Underneath it all, there is a practical business strategy
Construction can become brutally competitive when work slows. Contractors cut margins to keep people busy, accepting more risk for less return.
Ciminelli believes better planning, earlier problem detection, less rework and more accurate forecasting can ultimately give clients something notoriously difficult to provide in construction: greater confidence around cost, schedule and outcome.
"What we're trying to drive toward is certainty," Frank said. "With certainty comes confidence, and those are words that don't come up very often in construction."
The ultimate goal is to create a delivery model so differentiated that Arc effectively becomes a market of one — chosen for what it can predict and deliver rather than how aggressively it can price a job.
“The vision is that we get to a place where a client looks at us and says, ‘These guys can give me a level of certainty that I can’t get somewhere else,’” Frank said. “If we can get there — if we can use all of this to de-risk a project before a client has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars committed — then we’ve created a completely different value proposition. You’ve created a market unto yourself.”
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