About
We built the platform we always wished we had.
SymphonIQ was born from $15B in backlog and two decades of watching the best people in engineering and construction make hard calls with incomplete records.
Born from $15B in backlog.
The founding problem was not “how do we adopt AI.” It was a major program that lost the people who understood it, and the discovery that the record which should have protected the company lived in their heads, not in the company.
Every contractor has a version of that story. A chief estimator retires and twenty years of owner knowledge goes with them. A PM takes the call from across the street and the next closeout starts with a dig through his inbox. The institutional memory of a firm that builds billion-dollar programs is mostly undocumented, and the tools that were supposed to help each knew one thing and shared nothing.
SymphonIQ exists to wake what lies dormant inside every organization: the knowledge it already owns, earned on real jobs and scattered across inboxes, drives and the people who happened to be in the room. We rediscover it, organize it and put it to work, so every pursuit, contract and closeout gets the benefit of everything the company has ever learned, and the record stays yours.
Twenty years of answers about owners, subs, clauses and what actually happened, sitting in inboxes, drives and the heads of the people who were in the room. Nobody can query it.
Memory Fabric seals every project into a record that answers questions. Governance before, during and after, with a library of calculation tools underneath, so what comes back is computed, verified and cited.
In production on rail and transit, heavy civil and energy infrastructure work, each in a private environment owned by the customer who runs it.
Field capture, consent-based context exchange across firms, SymphonIQ Campus for the next generation of builders, and a platform every contractor type can own.
Built by people from your side of the table.
Construction, pursuit, enterprise security and AI systems. Nobody on the team is learning the industry from the demo, and every advisor has reviewed the platform in detail.
Leadership
Twenty years in infrastructure, executive talent and business development, on more than $10B of engineering and construction pursuit. Built SymphonIQ to turn hard-won company knowledge into governed intelligence a business gets to keep.
Twenty years delivering upstream and midstream energy projects. Expertise in organizational development, software integration and adoption, and field execution. He ran SymphonIQ on live work before he ran SymphonIQ.
Chairman and CEO of Herzog, a national rail, transit and heavy civil builder. Led Herzog Technologies before taking the helm of all Herzog companies in 2019. Technology executive and former Missouri state senator. A founding partner in SymphonIQ.
Board of advisors
Twenty-five years building the organizations that deliver the nation’s largest civil infrastructure. Organization development, construction technology and billion-dollar program delivery.
Twenty years leading execution on the nation’s largest infrastructure projects, across engineering, estimating, accounting, business operations, field operations and risk.
Forty years in cybersecurity, from military aerospace to Fortune 100 boardrooms. Former CISO at Microsoft and AT&T Wireless. CEO of AtomicTangerine (SRI International). National policy advisor on AI governance.
Two decades architecting enterprise software at scale at J.D. Power, Huron and Slalom. Managing Director of Custom Application Development. Cloud migration, regulated environments and global delivery.
Air Force Academy. Early CrowdStrike. Founder, inventor and two decades advising cybersecurity ventures from seed to scale. Advises Graylog, Anchore and Red Cell Partners. Active investor in AI and security startups.
Our mission.
From the founder
Jared Smith Founder & CEO“Our mission is to build safe, trustworthy AI that preserves institutional knowledge and strengthens human judgment. With governance built in and intelligence that compounds over time, SymphonIQ makes human expertise more valuable instead of automating it away.”
AI should make organizations smarter. Not just faster.
Our guiding principles.
These are the commitments behind every design decision in the platform, and the ones customers can hold us to.
Build intelligence people own.
Your own private environment, no cross-customer training, no shared memory between customers, nothing retained if you leave. The value your people create accrues to you, not to a vendor.
Governance is architecture, not a filter.
Policy shapes how the system reasons before an answer exists. Bolted-on guardrails are how governance fails.
Receipts over rhetoric.
Every number from a tool, every clause to a page and paragraph, every benchmark with its evidence. If we can’t show the source, we say “insufficient evidence.”
Amplify people. Never replace them.
The platform informs. An authorized person decides. The best estimator in the firm gets better, not redundant.
Earn trust with a log, not a promise.
Refusals, tool runs and policy decisions are all logged and readable. Ask to see them.
Built with the people who build.
Every specialist went through working estimators and proposal leads before it shipped. The industry sets the bar, not the demo.
Bring us one live project.
One live pursuit, contract problem or closeout. We work it in front of you, on the platform, with your people in the room.