NOVO Construction, Inc.

NOVO Construction, Inc. is a general contractor founded in 2000 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with additional offices in San Francisco and Austin. The firm builds mainly commercial interiors, corporate workplace, life sciences and base building projects for technology and biotech clients across the Bay Area and Texas. It has been an early adopter of construction technology on the preconstruction side. NOVO is running BuildCheck’s automated drawing-comparison tool on two California projects, using it to flag changes between successive drawing sets before those changes reach pricing, a task the firm previously handled through manual overlay review in Bluebeam.

NOVO started in November 2000, when Jim Fowler, Robert Williamson and Arne Ericson set out to build a mid-size, nimble commercial contractor. Their first jobs came from relationships the three already had at previous companies. Fowler is now president and CEO, and the company marked 25 years in 2025.

Some figures from its own overview: 350 employees, more than 40 LEED professionals on staff, and an experience modifier rate of 0.55 against a stated industry average of 1.00. That last number is a workers’ compensation loss metric owners use when screening bidders on safety, and few contractors publish it openly.

The office count is four rather than three. Menlo Park is the headquarters at 1460 O’Brien Drive, with San Francisco, South San Francisco and Austin rounding it out. Union affiliations track the geography: Local 22 in San Francisco, Local 212 in Menlo Park, Local 405 in San Jose. NOVO holds California contractors license 791022.

The company is a certified Minority Business Enterprise through the National Minority Supplier Development Council, certified by way of the Western Regional Minority Supplier Development Council. It states that it actively seeks out diverse subcontractors, vendors and suppliers, and supports workforce development across its markets.

The sectors it names are high tech and software, life science, professional services and campus work. Project types run to corporate interiors, manufacturing, facilities, R&D labs, data centers and sustainability scopes. Internally, project executives run small teams with real decision authority rather than routing calls upward, which is how the company explains its ability to move quickly on schedule-driven interiors work.

On client strategy the site is blunt: NOVO would rather do a hundred projects for a single customer than single projects for a hundred customers, and it traces a large share of current work back to those founding relationships. Community giving is handled through an internal committee called NOVO for Change, which maintains relationships with organizations across the Bay Area and Texas.