Adalia Zhao

Adalia Zhao is the founder of BuildTrace, an AI platform that functions as “Git for construction drawings,” bringing version control, change detection, and collaboration to one of the world’s most complex industries.

Raised in a poor family in China, Adalia developed a competitive spirit from an early age, excelling in sports, math and dance competitions where she loved to win. With no family connections to lean on, she hustled her way through college—launching a tutoring business from her dorm room that grew to generate over $100,000 per month. With that success, she funded her own education and earned admission to the world’s leading construction management program at UC Berkeley.

After graduation, Adalia spent three years in the trenches of the U.S. construction industry as a project engineer at a top general contractor. There, she experienced firsthand the inefficiencies and bottlenecks that plague large projects and became convinced that the industry held massive untapped potential for technology-driven change. Determined to be part of that solution, she taught herself to code and, within five months, joined Microsoft Azure, where she built cloud and AI infrastructure at scale for four years.

Today, Adalia is channeling her combined expertise in construction and software into BuildTrace, driven by the conviction that the construction industry deserves the same kind of transformation that software development has undergone with AI and version control.