BuildSOS
Our mission
To build and implement integrity and risk reduction systems for communities to improve disaster-related infrastructure, enhance efficiency, reduce fraud, and keep value local.
To do that, BuildSOS created a transparent, easy-to-use platform that significantly reduces the potential for fraud, lowering the risk and the frustration for everyone involved in the rebuilding process. BuildSOS helps communities rebuild faster and stronger after a disaster by saving homeowners, contractors, insurance companies, and local and state governments time, money, and a lot of frustration, by reducing fraud, finger-pointing, and risk.
How BuildSOS began
Following the floods that devastated Southeast Louisiana in 2016, a group of contractors, many of whom sit on Louisiana’s contractor licensing boards and lead their local Homebuilder Associations, started sharing their frustrations with each other. Not just the cost of rebuilding, but the time and irritation of doing it inside a system that seemed to work against everyone in it.
After a lot of discussion and research, they identified the real obstacle: the gaps between every key player in a rebuild — government, homeowners, insurers, builders, volunteers, and suppliers. Each one was working to improve their own responsiveness and preparedness. Collectively, they were falling short anyway. The result was financial hardship for communities, insurers leaving the state, longer rebuild times, more aid dollars that reached fewer of the people who needed them, and communities spending recovery dollars somewhere else while they waited for their own community to come back.
Fraud made it worse. Because of storm chasers and other bad actors, every party in the process had its guard up. Each business built its own safeguards and stopgaps to protect itself, and those defenses slowed everything down and cost more. Instead of a team working toward a shared goal, disaster recovery had become a system full of unnecessary inefficiency, frustration, and finger-pointing.
Our impact
Our team did what contractors do best. We built a structure to help people.
BuildSOS empowers homeowners by giving them the control to identify and engage with honest contractors through our verification process, backed by education on what to actually expect during a rebuild and transparency at every step.
We’re working to change how recovery happens in communities, helping people build back better and faster. Our technology makes it easier for the right people to do things the right way, and dramatically harder for wrongdoers to commit fraud and hurt people who’ve already been through enough.