Start me up: SmartStruct

Justin Stanton

Editor, DC+

18 May 2026

Want to kill nine of the 10 profit killers in construction? Want one platform with everything in one place? Perhaps SmartStruct is what you’re after.

Image of SmartStruct platform. Image: SmartStruct — Image: SmartStruct

Ahead of appearing at Digital Construction Week (DCW) in the Start-Up Village, SmartStruct founder and CEO Dean Dixon tells DC+ about his startup.

DC+: You’ve got two minutes: what problem does your technology solve and how does it do it?

Dean Dixon: Construction has 10 big profit killers. SmartStruct kills nine of them.

The industry still runs on paper and spreadsheets. People are scrolling through budgets, drowning in emails, chasing tasks. It’s slow, error-prone and leaks profit every day.

So we built a single platform where the office, site, subs, and clients are all connected in real-time. Plans, budgets, RFIs, tasks, progress photos – everything is in one place. No more “I thought you had the latest drawing”. No more work done without a change order. No more underbilling because someone forgot to log progress.

We remove the chaos, so our users can cut admin time by 62% and paper by 86%. They stop leaking profit on inaccurate estimates, rework, poor communication and lost labour hours.

Nine of the top 10 causes – gone.

Which one don’t we fix? Theft and vandalism. Can’t help you there, but everything else? We’ve got you covered.

OK, you’ve got my attention: who’s tested or already using your tech and what are the results?

Currently using the platform, we have: SMEs with £5m-£250m turnover looking to grow, and larger companies that have SmartStruct to bring together their franchises.

A lot of our users come to us with data silos and lots of valuable data that they can’t learn from. Or they work across many disconnected apps to try to build something that covers everything they need. It all just leads to confused information.

Our experience with similar platforms was that we never quite got what we needed. We help our users overcome this by bringing it all into one place. It’s clearer and simpler; no more lost opportunities and no more juggling apps.

We try to be flexible. We communicate with our customers to improve SmartStruct’s features and make sure they always have the tool they need. It’s been built with them and for them.

SmartStruct is improving companies from day one, and that’s direct feedback.

What’s your senior management team’s background?

I have 15 years in modular construction and 12 years in residential and commercial fit-out, before I helped to start SmartStruct. So, I’ve done a lot and had to use management software throughout, so I’m familiar with what SmartStruct needs to be.

Henry Sly is a QS. He came on board early as an implementation director with great first-hand experience of what the platform needed for someone using it every day.

We also have Nick Saul, our technical director and developer of the platform. He has a background in building systems like this that improve businesses every day. He built it from the ground up with us, on board from the beginning, making sure it all works.

We later brought in Henry Judge and Shan, who have helped us with going to market. Shan has experience with software, so she was a great help in finding where we needed to go and how to approach the market. Henry is using it himself, so he’s also our number one in field testing.