Bricks And Bytes

"I think what dies is when you have someone show up and they don't actually understand the problem they're solving and they can't relate to a builder."

That's Brett Dahmer, CFO of Performance Contracting Group, on what actually kills a vendor pitch inside a 60+ office, employee owned specialty contractor.

We sat down with Brett for a rare finance side view of ConTech decisions. He walked us through:

BarrierCube Ventures, PCG's own venture arm, and why a contractor started writing cheques into startups

The Track3D investment, and what happens when you're both a startup's investor and its biggest customer

The line KP Reddy gave him early on that he still uses to size up every founder

Brett's quick fire answer on ROI in construction tech is worth the listen alone. A vendor once quoted him a figure for a company he knows personally, and it didn't hold up.

Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify.

#aec #bricksandbytes #construction #constructiontech #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 Introduction to Brett Dahmer and Performance Contracting

03:53 The Role of Technology in Construction

08:51 Establishing a Venture Arm: Barrier Cube Ventures

11:30 CFO Perspectives on Technology Investments

17:19 Investing in Track Free D: A Case Study

22:43 The Dual Role: Investor and Customer

26:19 Challenges in Selling Technology to PCG

26:49 Understanding the Pain Points in Problem Solving

28:01 The Importance of Humility in Innovation

29:57 Navigating Technology Implementation in Construction

33:12 Consolidation of Technology for Efficiency

35:13 Exploring Robotics and Automation in Construction

37:32 Evaluating New Solutions: The First Questions

40:12 The Role of Empathy in Founders' Pitches

42:40 Reflecting on Investment Trends in Construction Tech

45:37 Challenges of Fragmentation in the Construction Industry

This week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping industrial construction, supply chain efficiency, and margin health on the ground.

For decades, European legacy builders insisted you couldn't make adequate margins delivering whole buildings from start to finish.

Now, German construction powerhouse Goldbeck is breaking into America through a massive joint venture with Mortenson, bringing 24,000 shared staff to deploy serial, Lego-like prefabrication across US jobsites.

The timing isn't accidental: hyperscalers building the world's largest AI data center campuses are actively squeezing contractors, demanding identical scopes of work for 20% less capital.

Next, the fatal flaw in construction productivity. On complex mega-projects, 40% to 50% of the budget no longer goes to labor or raw materials—it is entirely eaten up by the compounding overhead of managing project complexity.

Contractors are drowning in hundreds of disconnected software point-solutions that function as expensive band-aids, creating busywork while failing to budge the profit-and-loss sheet.

Finally, re-engineering the labor equation. Industry veterans argue that true productivity isn't about software efficiency, but standardizing demand so supply can finally scale.

Cutting runaway project management complexity in half could instantly free up the capital contractors need to invest directly in trades, boosting wages and genuinely reversing the chronic craft labor shortage.

Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

700 AI agents hacked Hugging Face.

They built a secret notice board inside OpenAI's own infrastructure, swapped over 70,000 messages on it, split the work between them and then tried to cover their tracks.

The headlines called it a warning shot for humanity.

So we asked two people who actually deploy this stuff inside construction what it means for us.

Alain Waha, CTO at Buro Happold: "It's PR gold and it's sales gold."

Dustin DeVan, CEO at Ediphi: "I think that there's probably a bit of fear mongering."

Their view: the vendors who created the agents now get to sell you agents to defend against agents. Convenient.

The part that should actually bother a contractor is smaller. The agents got in using leaked passwords they found online. Count how many logins your project teams hold across estimating, PM, document control and the rest. That is the exposure.

And then the flip side, which is where the episode gets interesting.

✅ An agent with infinite time will read a six week bid pack more completely than any human ever has (Alain)

✅ Preconstruction is a capital allocation equation, and most of the industry still treats it as "ingest a design and price it" (Dustin)

✅ Give an agent the wrong goal and it cheats. Give it the right one and it finds the complexity in your design that never needed to be there

Jake Olsen from Stratus joins for the second half on why data centres are forcing MEP contractors to become manufacturers whether they like it or not.

Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments.

#bricksbucksandbytes #constructiontech #ai #aec #construction

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:11 OpenAI AI Agents Hack Hugging Face Explained

02:03 How 700 AI Agents Breached Hugging Face

05:01 AI Cyber Attacks: Real Threat or PR Gold?

07:39 AI Fear Mongering, Regulation and Big Tech

10:36 Anthropomorphism: Do AI Agents Think Like Humans?13:23 AI Agents in Construction Bidding and Preconstruction

15:53 Preconstruction as Capital Allocation (IPD Explained)

18:32 Human in the Loop: Generative Design and Cost

21:23 Solow Paradox: Why Construction Software Costs Keep Rising

24:07 Why AI Adoption Fails in Construction Companies

26:53 Sam Altman iPhone Moment, Point Solutions vs Platforms

32:32 Stratus: MEP Fabrication Software Explained

34:07 Why Data Centers Are Driving Prefab Construction

38:44 Industrialized Construction: Will Contractors Go Back?41:42 Goldbeck Mortenson Joint Venture and the Future of MEP

49:20 a16z MEP Thesis: Is Revit Really Outdated?

55:26 Revit vs Fabrication Design: LOD 400 and PLM

"If you're considered a feature, you're dead."

Klas Berghede has spent nearly twenty years at Boldt, a 100% employee owned contractor that has been building since 1889.

We asked him whether there is still room for point solutions in construction tech.

He said the door is closing.

Adoption of AI across the industry is high. Measured improvement is close to zero. McKinsey's latest numbers back him up.

Klas reckons roughly half the cost of a complex American build is no longer labour or material. It's the coordination around it.

The near term winners will own a whole workflow end to end, not one clever step inside it.

Half of ConTech will hate this. The other half already knew.

In this episode of Bricks & Bytes, Klas argues that construction has an addiction to solving complex problems with complex solutions, that the industry starts every project from scratch and expects to improve anyway, and that the labour shortage is not the biggest problem we have.

Episode out on Youtube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #constructiontech #aiOur Sponsors:BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.coAphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.coArchdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.comChapters00:00 Intro01:10 Quick-fire round02:10 Construction's addiction to complex solutions03:33 Who is Bolt? 135 years, employee-owned, self-performing05:32 Inside the data center boom08:55 Data centers and rebuilding the power grid11:12 Inelastic buyers and the scramble for equipment14:45 What industrialized construction really means20:07 The 80/20 rule and the industrialized continuum24:04 AI: better, or just busier?29:13 Workflows over data, and the "definition of insanity"34:16 Why doesn't the whole industry go industrialized?38:24 Is there still room for point solutions?44:12 The flood of copycat AI tools48:43 The real problem isn't the labor shortage54:40 Why projects keep getting more complex56:58 Advice to leaders: never do it twice from scratch📩 Subscribe to the Bricks & Bytes Newsletter: https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/🌐 Visit our website: http://bricks-bytes.com/📲 Follow us: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bricks-bytes/ Twitter: https://x.com/bricksbytespod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bricksbytes/

This week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping jobsite technology, supply chain security, and risk on the ground.

For five thousand years, construction has relied on chalk lines and measuring tapes to decide where walls go.

While robotic total stations arrived twenty years ago, adoption has stalled near 16%.

Now, layout automation is splitting into two clear approaches: printing robots that paint permanent lines and text directly on the slab, and optical projectors that beam designs onto floors, walls, and ceilings.

Early data shows the value isn’t just labor reduction—it comes from re-sequencing the job. In one hospital build, setting full layout in a single pass let mechanical contractors work ahead of framers, cutting schedule risk and saving $2.5 million. Meanwhile, vendors are pivoting to outcome-as-a-service models rather than pure hardware sales.

Next, the pricing shock in physical AI. At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, Chinese models demonstrated sub-$10,000 price points—with the Unitree R1 starting near $5,900—compared to US equivalents estimated near $250,000.

But cheap hardware comes with hidden supply chain dependencies and security exposures. Chinese brands already account for roughly 97% of the commercial construction drone fleet, which now faces looming regulatory freezes, tariffs, and potential data-sharing liabilities on secure sites.

Finally, the target on your digital infrastructure. Construction has surged to become the fourth most-targeted industry for ransomware, with 22 distinct cybercrime groups hitting contractors in Q1 alone.

Last week, America's largest contractor, Turner Construction, disclosed a breach compromising thousands of personal files and project records.

The threat landscape is shifting rapidly: autonomous, AI-driven agents are now conducting reconnaissance and executing automated attacks at machine speed, rendering traditional human-speed incident response obsolete.

Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

Bill Gates says robots will take construction jobs by 2030. Dustin DeVan offered to bet his entire net worth against it.

In this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Owen, Dustin and Martin pull apart the 6,000 word essay Gates published this week and ask the question nobody in construction wants to answer out loud:

if AI is making everyone so much more productive, why has nobody's headcount actually gone down?

What they get into:

Why Bill Gates thinks construction and hospitality roles shift to robots by 2030, and why the panel thinks he's wrong

Meta's own internal numbers: code changes up 220%, features that reached users up just 36%, security incidents up 40%

The Architecture Billings Index at 46.6, the longest slump since records began in 1995, and what it says about 2027

California's new sales tax on software and what it does to the cost of running a business

#aec #construction #tech #contech

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 Why AI Job Loss Predictions Keep Missing

01:49 Bill Gates AI Essay Explained: Which Jobs Disappear First

03:48 Can AI Hack Real Systems? Gates on Cybersecurity Risk

06:37 Will Robots Replace Construction Workers by 2030?

09:35 AI Companions and Teen Mental Health: The 72% Problem

12:14 Meta $18 Billion Settlement: What It Means for TikTok and YouTube

17:38 California SB 122: The New Sales Tax on SaaS

28:30 Why Free Government Services Are Never Free

30:40 Will Businesses Leave California Over Taxes?

31:21 Architecture Billings Index 46.6: The Longest Slump on Record

35:08 Data Centers vs Everything Else: The Construction Split

41:40 How to Hire Software Engineers: In-House vs Agency

47:18 Can You Rebuild an Estimating Platform with AI?

Four founders competing in construction layout walked into the same room.Nobody expected them to agree on much.But across the conversation, all four revealed the same thing about who they are really up against.Not each other.Tessa Lau, CEO and co-founder of Dusty Robotics: “Pretty much our biggest competitor is chalk lines and measuring tape.”William St-Pierre, CEO of Mechasys: “Our biggest competitor today is like DeWalt or Milwaukee with their tape measures.”Tomer Elran, co-founder of LIGHTYX: “They are not transferring from one technology to the other. They’re transforming from almost zero technology.”Derrick Morse, founder and CEO of Rugged Robotics, on HP entering the category: “HP has a marketing machine and a budget that I can only dream of. So for them to enter the race and to participate, I think is a net net win for everyone.”Eight rounds. Sixty-second answer caps. No slides.They debated accuracy, distribution, union adoption, capital, robots versus laser projection and whether construction layout could become a winner-take-all market.It took us more than eight months to get these four founders into the same room.Huge thanks to Christian Reed, founder and CEO of REEKON Tools, for moderating and to Tessa, Derrick, William and Tomer for taking part.#bricksandbytes #construction #constructiontech #constructionrobotics #aec**Chapters**00:00 Intro01:00 Why Construction Layout Is Ready for Automation02:51 Meet the Four Founders Competing for the Floor05:44 Chalk Lines, Tape Measures and 5,000 Years of Habit08:50 Debris, Dust and the Mess Nobody Plans For11:37 The $18M Hospital That Reportedly Saved $2.5M14:49 HP Entered the Market. Its Rivals Welcomed It17:41 Sub-Millimetre Accuracy or Simplicity?20:57 What Happens When the Model Meets the Slab23:59 Getting Contractors to Use the Technology26:31 Who Should Own Layout: The GC or the Subs?29:35 From Union Resistance to Training Programmes32:33 Four Founders on What Drives Adoption36:12 Why Rugged Sends Its Own Operators to Site38:33 Why Distribution Could Decide the Winner40:17 When Does the Price Make Sense?41:32 The New Jobs Created by Construction Robotics43:15 What Is Stopping This Market From Scaling?48:21 Could Construction Layout Become Winner-Take-All?52:57 Venture Timelines vs Construction Timelines56:41 Lightning Round and Audience Questions📩 Subscribe to the Bricks & Bytes Newsletter: [https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/](https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/)🌐 Visit our website: [http://bricks-bytes.com/](http://bricks-bytes.com/)

“We never use the word AI anywhere. You’re saying we’re an AI company, not me.”

Mo Akbari-Hochberg built HoloBuilder and sold it to FARO. Now he is back with BuildCrew, a preconstruction platform backed by Khosla Ventures that uses digital workers to help contractors with estimating, trade scoping, bid levelling and preconstruction RFIs.

In this episode, Mo explains why he believes 99% of construction AI teams do not properly understand the technology they are building with, why access to the same AI models does not produce the same results and what contractors should look for when buying AI software.

We also discuss how BuildCrew can produce a rough order of magnitude estimate in 4 to 5 hours, compare 10 electrical bids in around 20 minutes and identify gaps across construction drawings and project documents.

🎥 Link in comments.

#BricksAndBytes #ConstructionAI #ConstructionTechnology #Preconstruction #ConstructionEstimating

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 How Mo Built a Startup: Founder Story

03:27 How to Build a High-Performing Team

05:30 AI in Construction: The Complete Breakdown

08:13 What is an AI Digital Intern?

11:16 BuildCrew AI vs Traditional Construction Tech

14:09 UI/UX & Reliability in B2B SaaS

16:33 Biggest Pain Points in Pre-Construction

19:29 High-End Residential Construction Challenges

22:23 Scaling Beyond Luxury Homes to Commercial

24:44 Customer Feedback & Product-Market Fit

28:54 How BuildCrew AI Saves Time on Site

31:02 Scaling Your Core Startup Team

34:19 Startup Hiring Strategy: Attracting Top Talent

35:58 Biggest Founder Mistakes & Lessons Learned

37:10 How to Build a Great Tech Product

38:10 How to Raise Venture Capital (VC Strategy)

39:29 AI Productivity Benchmarks & Industry Insights

43:38 Practical Use Cases of AI in Construction

47:26 Biggest Misconceptions About AI

52:17 Adapting to Rapid Changes in AI & Tech

54:52 Will AI Replace Estimators? (Future of ConTech)

This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same question. Where is the work going next.

In the last five weeks more than two billion dollars has been poured into construction machines that drive themselves. TerraFirma raised 115 million. Travis Kalanick, the man who founded Uber, raised 1.7 billion for Atoms, which includes an autonomous mining division. Komatsu signed a partnership to put autonomous bulldozers and excavators on American jobsites. And Bedrock Robotics, who regular listeners will remember from our Texas site visit, announced fully autonomous excavators working on live customer sites in Nevada and Texas. But this is not one market. There are five distinct business models in play, and they do not all sit on your side of the table. One of them is bidding against you for the same earthworks contracts.

Then the reason all this money is chasing machines in the dirt. Travis Kalanick put it simply. Manufacturing changes atoms, real estate stores them, transport moves them. Uber was the network layer for moving things. His new company is building the same thing for entire industries. Construction sites may be where AI learns to understand the physical world, and every hour an autonomous machine works it is banking data that no lab can buy off a shelf.

Then the two numbers that matter for your order book. American housebuilders dropped 12.4% in July to their weakest level since November 2022. The strange part is that permits went up 5% to 1.44 million. Builders are paying for permission and refusing to break ground. That is them telling you in the clearest language they speak that they do not trust demand at today's prices. And the work that has been filling the gap, data centres, hit a new kind of wall this week. Not money. Not power. Votes. Fort Worth voted unanimously to pause new data centre construction. Louisville voted 24 to 1 to pause approvals for six months. New York already has a statewide freeze in place. Permission has become the scarce input, and it is being decided city by city.

Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

We spoke to Kevin Peterson this week. He runs the tech at Bedrock Robotics.

He told us their control room "looks like StarCraft, actually."

You click on an excavator on a screen and give it a job. Then it just digs. Nobody sitting in it.

This went live on real customer sites on Monday.

The same day, a company called Gravis Robotics got $200 million from SoftBank.

We asked Kevin about the timing. Nobody seems to know.

Full chat with Kevin and Alain is out now on Bricks Bucks and Bytes.

#bricksbucksandbytes #bricksandbytes #aec #constructiontech #ai

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters00:00 Intro

00:55 Construction Autonomy's Biggest Week04:25 Bedrock Robotics Goes Fully Autonomous + Gravis $200M SoftBank Round06:54 Why Autonomous Machines Took 25 Years to Arrive09:52 How Waymo Technology Made Jobsite Autonomy Possible12:50 What Does Fully Autonomous Actually Mean?16:06 Who Is Investing in Construction Robotics (SoftBank, CapitalG, NVIDIA)18:59 Autonomous Excavation vs Excavators: The Real Market22:01 Kevin Peterson Interview: No Driver, No Operator, No Oversight24:48 Bedrock vs Gravis: The Autonomy Race Heats Up28:01 Self-Driving Cars vs Construction: Which Is Harder?31:42 How Autonomous Excavators Handle Safety on Site33:39 Training an Excavator Like an LLM: Physical AI Explained36:44 Orchestrating Machine Fleets on Construction Sites39:10 Why Construction Sites Break Self-Driving Logic44:33 World Models, Procore DroneDeploy Deal & AI Consolidation51:16 Will AI Replace Construction Consultants?

"Don't build. It's that simple."

Strange advice from a man who built his own Procore.In 2011, Novo Construction evaluated Procore and walked away.

They built Sentinel instead, their own system of record. Fifteen years later, Colin Stoner (Chief Innovation Officer, 22 years at the company) told us why that call made them AI ready before most of the industry had a data strategy.

The catch in his advice: build only if your team has total buy in. Without it, don't start.

✓ Every AI build at Novo starts with one question: "What do you hate about your job?"

✓ RFIs drafted by AI trained on more than a decade of their own writing

✓ Claude Code in use every day. His word: "religiously"

✓ Headcount untouched.

His goal, verbatim: "same headcount, more revenue, more projects"

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #constructiontech #ai

Chapters

00:00 Intro01:00 Introduction to Colin Stoner and Novo Construction

04:02 The Role of AI in Construction

07:01 Technology Evolution in Construction

10:07 Challenges in Construction Technology Adoption

12:57 Building Technology Internally vs. Buying

16:00 The Sentinel System: Overview and Benefits

19:07 AI Integration and Future Prospects

22:06 Advice for Companies Considering Internal Development

27:11 Streamlining Certificate of Insurance Tracking

29:18 Revolutionizing RFI Processes with AI

33:03 Enhancing Project Management with AI Tools

35:20 Navigating External Tech Solutions

39:52 Challenges of Tech Sales in Construction

42:57 Preparing for AI Integration in Construction

46:24 The Role of AI in Workforce Dynamics

47:34 Maintaining Human Touch in Construction CommunicationOur Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same fortnight and point in the same direction.

First, a closed room in central London. The CTO of DPR Construction, a 14 billion dollar US contractor, sat around a table with tier one contractors, engineers, investors and founders. The consensus was uncomfortable. The biggest clients on the planet are telling their supply chains to price on outcomes instead of hours, and to expect that price to fall every year. Nobody in the room, client side included, had a working answer for what replaces the hours model. The near term AI pressure lands in the back office first, not on site. The people best placed to rethink how this industry works are the exact ones pinned to the most lucrative projects, with no time to look up.

Then the numbers. The Associated Builders and Contractors survey puts the average US contractor backlog at eight months flat, the lowest since January, down across every region, every sector and every company size. The 12% of contractors holding data centre work are sitting on 11.4 months of runway. The other 88% are at 7.5. That gap went from two and a half months in June to 3.9 months in July. Fluor, one of the biggest engineering and construction firms on earth, saw its shares jump 17.4% in a single day for saying the better money sits one layer below the boom, in power, on contracts where someone else carries the risk.

Then open weight AI. Meta and Nvidia both released open weight models this week. The cost of running these models has fallen from 30 dollars per million tokens in 2023 to fractions of a cent today. Gartner projects costs fall another 90% by 2030. The firms selling AI tools built on top of someone else's model are about to get squeezed out. The construction firms that win are the ones that take their own project data, the one asset the big labs cannot get anywhere else, and train on top of it. Not your weights, not your product.

Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of the LinkedIn post.

"The US is dangerously close to the brink of being Japan 1989."

That is not a hot take from a doom account. That is Patric on this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, laying out why asset overvaluation in private markets and infrastructure has him worried about stagflation.

On this episode:

✅ Why data center contractors are sitting on 11.4 months of backlog while everyone else has 7.5

✅ The AI productivity story corporate America still cannot prove with real numbers

✅ Why the construction RFP process is fundamentally broken, and who is actually responsible for it

✅ What Meta's new partnership with North America's Building Trades Unions means for the data center buildout

Dustin DeVan put it plainly: "You can't now build a project that much cheaper."

Where do you land? Are we in a two speed economy that eventually corrects, or is this just what infrastructure spending looks like now? Tell us why we're wrong.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:08 Welcome Back and Personal Updates

03:43 Exploring Proto Town and Bedrock Robotics

06:41 Travel Frustrations and Unexpected Adventures

09:30 The Concept of Proto Town in Europe

12:12 AI Price Collapse and Economic Implications

14:58 Data Center Boom and Its Effects

17:31 Market Dislocations and Construction Industry Insights

19:51 Interest Rates and Economic Perspectives

22:50 Potential Risks and Future Predictions

25:39 Final Thoughts on Economic Trends

30:38 Understanding Time vs. Cost Savings

32:07 The Role of Technology in Construction

33:36 Owners and Technology Awareness

34:41 The Importance of Pricing Optionality

36:14 The Shift in AI Pricing and Accessibility

38:42 Navigating AI Models and Corporate Needs

43:50 Leadership and Product Understanding

45:54 Governance and AI Deployment Challenges

53:34 Rethinking RFP Processes for Better Outcomes

56:25 Meta's Role in Construction Training Initiatives 

"Everybody thinks that autonomous heavy equipment is commonplace, whereas in fact the adoption is basically zero."

Frederik Filz-Reiterdank said that to us from the operator's seat of an autonomous roller, on a live chip fab site in upstate New York, with his dozers and dump trucks working away behind him.

His company, Crewline AI, raised a $7.1M seed earlier this year led by Initialized Capital and Nebular to automate the machine operators hate driving.

What we got into:

✅ Why the roller is the wedge for construction autonomy, and why the excavator falls last

✅ A retrofit kit that turns a standard drum roller into a self-driving one in under an hour

✅ Selling a "virtual roller operator" instead of renting out a robot

✅ The four month insurance grind nobody warns robotics founders about

✅ Why 95% of candidates are disqualified the moment they hear about the forward-deployed lifestyle

Full episode now live on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:00 Introduction and Context of the Conversation

03:43 Autonomy in Construction: Current State and Misconceptions

09:21 Choosing Rollers: The Perfect Wedge for Automation

11:47 Understanding Pain Points in Construction

14:55 Business Models: Robotics as a Service vs. Outcome-Based Pricing

18:49 Deployment Strategy for Autonomous Rollers

21:00 Insurance and Liability Challenges

22:09 Building Trust with Customers

24:45 Overcoming Skepticism in Construction

27:49 Future of Automation in Construction

32:10 First Steps for Contractors

A 4x levered AI fund handed its entire public book to Citadel. The S&P 500 crossed $70 trillion days later.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, Patric put a date on the next one:

"We're 15 months away from that Palantir moment, 100%."

Physical automation. His argument: Asia already won the hardware game, so the money is with whoever actually deploys the machines. Which, quietly, is a contractor business.

Dustin doesn't buy the humanoid hype. Martin wants to know who gets hurt when the music stops.

New Bricks, Bucks & Bytes out now.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #vc #ai

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:00 The AI fund that had to sell everything

04:04 Who is Leopold Aschenbrenner?

06:54 The S&P 500 hits $70 trillion

10:04 Without data centers, GDP is barely growing

13:04 Can regulation actually stop a crash?

15:53 Why the market might never crash again

24:34 Nobody is funding the physical economy

25:53 Asia won robot hardware. The Palantir moment is next

31:04 Tax the robots, retire at 55

34:39 Retraining workers for the robot economy

We asked Scoreboard AI's Charles Ma what the single most expensive mistake contractors make at buyout is. His answer:"Outsourcing their understanding of the project to their trade partners."Charles was employee #1 at Versatile, one of construction tech's most well-funded bets (over $100M raised). Now he's building Scoreboard AI to fix a much quieter problem: scope gaps that get buried in project documents and don't surface until the crew is standing there waiting for a fix.In this episode we get into:- What Versatile got right, and where the product fell short of the ROI it promised- Why Charles thinks "AI wrappers are dead" in preconstruction- How hard bid, GMP, and design-build buyout processes each create their own scope gap risk- Why Scoreboard has deliberately stayed away from flashy fundraise announcementsFull episode is live on Bricks and Bytes Youtube Channel#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 - Teaser

01:00 - Quickfire Round

02:32 - Inside Versatile: the early days and the Chase Center project

09:27 - Is construction tech overhyped or underhyped right now

11:10 - Why Scoreboard has avoided the flashy fundraise playbook

16:43 - The perverse incentives of VC-backed construction tech

20:21 - Do "AI wrappers" win the current land grab

26:02 - Why Charles believes AI wrappers are dead

28:25 - What a scope gap actually is, and why it happens at buyout

32:55 - Hard bid vs. GMP vs. design-build: where the gaps creep in

36:50 - Measuring the real cost of scope gaps

41:51 - How Scoreboard AI actually works

43:21 - Show your work: building trust in AI outputs

48:59 - Pricing philosophy: running Scoreboard like a Costco

51:26 - Expansion beyond the US

52:41 - What's working in go-to-market right now

54:08 - Will AI ever run preconstruction end-to-endOur Sponsors:

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Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

This week's briefing covers three things that are already changing the shape of construction, one of them from a dirt road in Texas at 4am.

Bedrock Robotics was founded by the team behind Waymo's driverless technology. They do not build new excavators. They take the ones contractors already own, fit them with sensors and a computer, and the machine digs on its own. This week we filmed a full documentary with them at Proto Town, a 12 acre test site near Austin where some of the most advanced hard tech companies on earth go to build things they cannot build anywhere else. The operator who has spent his career inside these machines watched one run without him and his answer was relief. The people closest to autonomous equipment are not the ones campaigning against it. The contractor running them on live sites across Texas today says productivity is up, revenue is up, and his crews are happier.

Then BlackRock. On Tuesday Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion data centre campus in El Paso. BlackRock owns 80%. Meta leases its own building back, operates it, and manages the construction. Roughly 90 cents in every dollar is borrowed. Wall Street used to lend money to these builds. It is now the one that owns them. That changes who your actual client is on the biggest programmes in the market.

And then the numbers behind the whole cycle. Over the past fortnight the four biggest data centre customers on earth all opened their books. Moody's tallied what six technology companies will spend on this build this year. $785 billion, heading for a trillion next year. Their word for it was unprecedented. When a ratings agency uses that word, it means they have never had to grade anything like it.

The question is no longer whether the work can be built. It is who is paying for it, and whether they can keep on paying.

Drop your answer in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

$845 million. In cash. That's what Procore just paid for DroneDeploy.

We sat down and ran the actual cross-sell math on this deal, and it's a lot steeper than the headline number makes it loo

We also got Handoff founder Dmitry Alexin on to talk about his AI estimating tool, and he was clear about one thing: "It's not a tool, it's not a takeoff tool."

And PR consultant Kevin Ferguson told us what it actually takes to get a construction tech startup covered in the press. Spoiler: it's not just having a good story

New episode's up.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

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Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 - Teaser

00:35 - Intro & Today's Agenda

01:02 - Procore Acquires DroneDeploy for $845M

08:55 - The Cross-Sell Math: Does the Deal Pencil Out?

16:28 - Dmitry Alexin (Handoff) Joins: Why Not Another Takeoff Tool

21:04 - Building H1: Assemblies, Pricing, and Computer Vision

32:58 - The Katerra Postmortem

41:04 - Kevin Ferguson Joins: The State of Construction Tech PR

"Construction's never had a software problem. They've had an assimilation problem."

That line from Joe Patrois stopped us mid-recording.

Joe was there on day one when Palantir walked into Thomas Cavanagh Construction. Eighteen months later, the company runs its operations on Foundry, field adoption of their app sits at 97 percent, and Joe now leads product at Cavtera, a new service provider helping other contractors do the same.

In this week's episode of Bricks & Bytes, we get past the Palantir hype and into the jobsite reality:

* What "ontology" actually means for a contractor

* Why they are stripping operations OUT of the ERP

* The change management that matters more than the software

* Why data should be the byproduct of operations, not the product

As Joe put it: "AI is an output. You don't do AI. It's an output of operations."

Full episode now live on YouTube and Spotify. Link in comments.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:45 Introduction to Palantir in Construction

03:29 The Journey of Kavanaugh Construction

05:49 Understanding Ontology and Its Importance

06:01 Sponsors

11:34 Change Management vs. Software Solutions

14:15 Replacing Legacy Systems with Palantir

16:35 The Value of Custom Solutions

19:43 Data as a Byproduct of Operations

22:32 Getting Started with Palantir

24:56 Common Pitfalls in Digitization

29:06 Building Foundations Before Scaling Solutions

32:15 Enhancing Communication Across Workflows

36:05 Navigating Change in Established Organizations

36:51 The Future of Point Solutions in Construction

39:08 Simplifying ERP Systems with Foundry

41:21 Common Pain Points in Construction Management

42:37 Real-World Applications of Foundry at Kavanaugh

46:55 Introducing Captera: A New Service Provider

48:19 Tailored Solutions for the Construction Industry

49:23 Ongoing Support and Implementation Services

51:00 The Future of Software in ConstructionOur Sponsors:

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Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

"Have we seen the productivity benefit from that? I think it's reasonable to say that no, no, we haven't."

That is Ryan Maibach, President and CEO of Barton Malow, on the software stackhis own teams are carrying.

Roughly 40 different tools for a project manager. Around 35 for a superintendent.

He is not describing a company that failed to adopt technology. He is describing one that adopted a lot of it and is now counting the cost.

His point on this week's episode was not that the tools are bad. Several of themwork. It is that digging foundations, placing concrete and erecting steel have not fundamentally changed, while the process wrapped around those activities has grown exponentially more complex. He is seeing burnout, and he is not seeing the productivity.

Then he took it somewhere harder.

If a construction manager exists partly to help a client overcome informationasymmetry, and AI hands that client the same knowledge directly, what is the service actually worth?

Full episode out now. Link below.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:45 Quickfire: builder or technologist

04:41 What Barton Malow actually builds

07:28 Where the industry goes in the next ten years

09:53 Sponsors

12:54 Labour, cost and the technology question

13:22 Why the downturn worries him more than the labour shortage

16:37 Data centers, and the pushback from inside his own team

19:09 Steering a company when nobody knows what happens next

22:10 What construction executives should prioritise right now

24:42 The AI strategy paradox

30:07 Second brains, and what happens to the general contractor

33:58 40 tools per PM and no productivity to show for it

36:50 LIFTbuild: building a tower from the top down

41:39 What they got wrong trying to change the industry

45:45 Hyperscalers as clients

48:42 How he actually runs his week

52:43 What he screens for when hiring

56:38 Bias, and the leader he learned the most from

Our Sponsors:

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Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

This week's briefing explores three of the biggest stories shaping construction.

First, we examine the first signs that the data centre boom may be beginning to moderate. Planning activity dipped in June, several high profile projects have been cancelled or withdrawn, and local opposition is increasingly influencing what gets built. We look at what the latest data really says, and whether this is simply a pause or the start of a broader shift.

Next, we unpack Arcadis' latest International Construction Costs report, why UK construction has become one of the most expensive markets in the world, and how the balance of power may be shifting from clients to contractors.

Finally, we revisit the AI pricing battle as new models, open weight releases and changing enterprise economics reshape the market. We also discuss Microsoft's warning on AI, data ownership and what construction businesses should be thinking about before committing to long term AI strategies.

Plus, we cover Monumental's $32M funding round, TerraFirma's $100M Series A, and the business lessons from NFL quarterback Jake Browning's demolition company.

"I've been cut four times."

That is an active NFL quarterback talking.

Jake Browning backs up Baker Mayfield at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

He also co-owns Sutter Street Demolition, an interior demolition subcontractor in LA.

He started with one $30,000 trash hauling truck.

No flashy launch. Just a low stakes way to build relationships with GCs before bidding a single demo job.

On this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we asked him:

→ Why he stays away from structural demo (for now)

→ How low overhead wins bids without change order games

→ Why he'd rather face a third and long blitz than a late paying GC

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #construction #constructiontech #aec

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:36 NFL Construction Trivia

03:25 NFL Players Who Own Construction Companies

06:12 The Biggest NFL Stadiums Ever Built

09:05 SoFi Stadium Construction Cost: $2.6B to $5.5B

11:57 Jake Browning Joins the Show

13:17 Playing QB for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers

15:11 Why an NFL Player Started a Demolition Company

17:34 Starting a Business With One $30,000 Truck

22:11 How Athletes Should Invest Their Money

27:21 NFL Lessons for Running a Business

30:12 Finding Your Competitive Advantage

37:14 How to Bid Demolition Jobs

42:19 Leadership Lessons From the NFL

42:48 Why Athletes Struggle to Monetize Their Brand

44:14 How to Win Work With General Contractors

45:28 Why Being Normal Wins in Construction

47:17 The Best NFL Stadiums to Play In

49:19 The Scariest Player in the NFL

51:32 Inside Sutter Street Demolition

55:26 Growing a Demolition Business the Right Way

🎧 Listen to the Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3P7JkiN9X3N4Kh6jlDsOgi?si=91JP5nxvQbKStkp8AQdAOg 📩 Subscribe to the Bricks & Bytes Newsletter: https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/🌐 Visit our website: http://bricks-bytes.com/📲 Follow us: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bricks-bytes/ Twitter: https://x.com/bricksbytespod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bricksbytes/Our Sponsors:BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

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"If you were saying, I'm adding AI to the product or we're now agentic, we now have an agentic AI component, it's not really news."

Katie Zeppieri said the quiet part out loud.

We invited the Founder and CEO of The MicDrop Agency onto Bricks & Bytes to demystify PR for construction tech. Her agency worked with Document Crunch from its early days through to the Trimble acquisition, so she has seen exactly what earns coverage and what gets deleted from a journalist's inbox.

A few things that stuck with us:

Events are still the number one marketing channel in construction, but only if you do the work before you land at the venue.

Muck Rack's research found that the overwhelming majority of AI citations come from earned media. If journalists are not writing about you, ChatGPT is not talking about you either.

If you have ever sent out a "we now integrate with X" press release, this episode is for you. Full conversation on YouTube and Spotify now.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #constructiontech #construction #aec #ai

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:17 How PR Works in Construction Technology

03:50 PR Strategy Explained: The Communications Triangle

06:44 What Makes a Story Newsworthy?

09:34 Common PR Mistakes Startups Make

10:22 Sponsors

13:23 Why Most PR Announcements Get Ignored

15:44 How to Build Relationships With Journalists

18:38 How Startups Get Featured in Major Publications

21:28 How Speaking at Industry Events Builds Your Brand

24:29 In-Person vs Virtual Events: Which Works Best?

27:36 How Media Relations Builds Long-Term Credibility

28:55 Construction Tech PR Case Study: Document Crunch

30:59 How to Announce a Startup Acquisition

36:11 PR Strategy for Seed-Stage Startups

40:26 Founder-Led Marketing and Personal Branding

45:23 Public Speaking Tips for Startup Founders

48:00 The Future of PR and Marketing

54:16 What PR Will Look Like in 2028

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Prototypes and demoware.

That was Monumental two years ago, at their $25m Series A.

Yesterday they announced a $32m Series B led by Khosla Ventures. In between, their robots laid the entire brickwork on 100 houses, plus canal walls and commercial buildings, as a subcontractor carrying full liability for the work.

The day after the announcement, co-founder Salar al Khafaji sat down with us.

In his words:

"The Series A was basically still like an R&D round... we had some prototypes, we had some like demoware basically."

"The Series B was raised off actual success."

And the line that will start arguments:

"Everyone is obsessed with speed. Speed doesn't really matter."

A bricklaying robot company telling you speed doesn't matter. His reasoning is worth the listen on its own.

Also in this one:

> Why SAM and Hadrian X were too early, and what changed

> Day zero to day one of a robot crew arriving on site

> The economics vs a traditional bricklaying gang

> UK going commercial, US pilots starting this year

> Why the entire facade is next. Not in a decade, within a couple of years.

🚨 Industry exclusive. Link in comments.

#bricksandbytes #constructiontech #aec #ai #vc

This week's briefing covers three things every construction leader should understand before they sign off on anything this year.

David Gal from Samsara makes the argument that three quarters of construction hasn't even started the thing that comes before AI. Not behind on AI. Behind on the step underneath it. He lays out a four stage journey, and most firms are at stage zero, still on the clipboard, still ringing round to find out where the excavator is. One firm he works with lost twenty million dollars of equipment in a single year without knowing it. The cost of not digitising is not zero. You just cannot see the bill yet.

Then KPMG surveyed over two thousand senior executives across twenty countries. Nearly a third said they had no idea where their growing AI costs were coming from. MIT looked at corporate AI projects and found ninety five percent of them fail, not on the technology, but on the groundwork nobody did. The AI worked. The organisation around it did not.

And the data centre boom, the thing keeping order books healthy while housing sits flat, is starting to slip. Not because the money has dried up. The four biggest tech companies are spending north of six hundred and fifty billion dollars this year alone. It is slipping because the wait for transformers and switchgear has stretched from two years to five. You can have the land, the funding and the chips and still not be able to build.

The same problem is underneath all three. And construction, the industry everyone calls backward, already knows what it is.

Drop your answer in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

"Real AI is way more about how you do change management than picking the right technology."

That is Dr. Sarah Buchner, founder and CEO of Trunk Tools, on this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes.

A year on from her $40M Series B, she joined the roundtable to explain why the hardest part of construction AI is not the model. It is getting people to trust it.

✅ Why Trunk Tools will not sell you agents unless you let them train your team first

✅ The shift from point solution to a "system of action" that sits on top of Procore and Autodesk

✅ Why a new AI takeoff startup seems to launch every week, and why most break on the last 20%

✅ Her blunt line on vibe coded tools: "Don't come on the market with something that Claude can already do."

Plus: a structural engineer breaks down the Midtown column buckling, and SubBase's Eric Helitzer on why a fintech led his $7M Series A.

🎧 Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:55 Introduction and Welcome

03:55 Trunk Tools Update and Series B Insights

06:46 Evolution of Trunk Tools: From Co-Pilot to System of Action

09:53 Challenges in Understanding Construction Drawings

12:52 Integration with Systems of Record

15:44 Building Trust in AI Agents

18:44 The Landscape of AI Startups in Construction

27:01 The Surge of AI in Outreach

28:07 Innovation in Construction Technology

32:35 Collaboration vs Competition in AI

34:44 Efficiency Gains in Construction

39:28 The Shift in AI Adoption

43:48 Future of Construction Tech and AI

47:58 Innovations in Construction Technology

49:33 Challenges in Construction Tech

50:16 The Future of Construction Tech

53:29 Structural Integrity and Engineering Insights

01:01:19 Funding and Growth in Construction Startups

Our Sponsors:

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Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

You can vibe code software in a weekend. You can't vibe code a decade of safety data.

That was the throughline with Ben Leach and Andrew Barron of HammerTech.

In an AI era obsessed with what's actually defensible, their answer wasn't features. It was data.

Ben built the company out of his own frustration on site:

"what's the point of sitting in there making sure that all your compliance is up to scratch if people are getting hurt out in the field"

In today's episode of Bricks & Bytes, we got into the real competitor (paper and spreadsheets, not rival software), why data centres are raising the safety bar for everyone, and what a solved job site looks like in ten years.

Full episode out now. Link below

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vcChapters

00:00 Intro

01:16 Introduction to HammerTech and Safety Technology

08:59 The State of Safety in Construction

15:25 The Transition from Manual to Digital Safety Processes

24:20 The Future of Reality Capture and Data in Construction

33:34 Customer Onboarding and Implementation Process

42:20 Navigating the Competitive Landscape

48:13 Future of Safety Technology in Construction

"How much money did we spend last year on small equipment?"

That's the one question David Gal, VP of Product & Engineering for ConnectedEquipment at Samsara, says stops most construction leaders cold.

Most of them can't answer it. And that blind spot is exactly why so many still can't use AI.

On today's episode, David walks us through the data maturity curve everycontractor climbs, whether they realise it or not: Phase 0 : clipboards, spreadsheets, and hundreds of thousands of assets nobodycan locate

Phase 1 : digitise the fleet, drop accidents, cut fuel

Phase 2 : insights, utilisation, proactive maintenance

Phase 3 : agents making the phone calls for you

His warning: you can't buy your way into Phase 3. Skip the groundwork and the AIhas nothing to stand on.

We also get into stolen fleets, autonomous job sites, and why one pane of glassbeats another point solution.

Watch the full episode on Youtube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction#constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:35 The Data Backbone Construction Never Built

02:57 Why Construction Operations Are So Hard to Digitize

05:18 The Phases of Digitizing a Construction Business

08:10 What Staying Analog Actually Costs You

09:51 Sponsor

12:52 The Real Cost of Analog (cont.)

14:09 Getting From Phase Zero to Your First Digital Win

17:01 What the Data Reveals Once You Digitize

20:00 Putting AI to Work in Daily Operations

27:32 How AI Is Reshaping Fleet Management

30:15 Where Virtual Assistants Actually Add Value

34:10 Getting Your Team to Adopt New Tech

36:22 What Autonomy Really Means for Construction

43:10 Where Contractors Should Start Tomorrow

This month's recap covers what June 2026 actually meant for the industry, and it was not what anyone had pencilled in.

The cheaper borrowing that stalled schemes were relying on did not arrive. The European Central Bank raised rates. The Fed held. The Bank of England held. And a spike in oil above 125 dollars a barrel, triggered by fears over the Strait of Hormuz, made central banks nervous about cutting at all. On the materials side, US tariffs on steel, aluminium and copper are sitting at 50 percent, with non-residential material costs rising at their fastest pace since 2022. One estimate puts 17,500 dollars of added cost onto a single new American home.

Both doors closed in the same month.

Then the split that was supposed to be temporary. Data centres are now a bigger construction category than offices. But the thing holding that work back is not money, it is power, and grid connections are running five to seven years behind the builds. The boom is real. The gate is megawatts.

Plus a full recap of the three June briefings you may have missed, on safety tech, the AI price war, what happens when AI hands your client the knowledge you used to charge for, and why the first piece of reconstruction technology in Ukraine is not a crane.

And some trivia. What Gustave Eiffel built inside the Statue of Liberty, and what a Boston World Cup pitch crew found ten inches underground that nobody had touched in twenty years.

The LinkedIn comment thread for this episode is where the conversation is happening. Come and tell us where you land.

$95M raises, Palantir's sovereignty play, and a debate that nearly boiled over. This one had everything.

This week on Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we sat down with Alain Waha (CTO, Buro Happold), Marc Minor (CEO, Higharc) and Jeevan Kalanithi (CEO, OpenSpace), alongside Owen, Patric, Martin and Dustin, for one of our most heated roundtables yet

On the table:

→ Palantir's new sovereign AI push with Nvidia, and whether "no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha" is real insight or pure marketing

→ Why Dustin thinks forward-deployed engineers "need to go away"

→ Higharc's fresh $95M Series C and the case for replacing AutoCAD in homebuilding

→ Whether the GC is really just an insurance company in disguise

→ Where OpenSpace is taking spatial AI eight months after acquiring Disperse

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:40 Alain Waha's Global ConTech Tour: India, US, Canada, UK

03:44 Why the West Underestimates India in Construction

06:36 India vs China: The $7 Trillion Construction Boom

09:25 Palantir vs Anthropic: The AI Sovereignty War

12:42 How Alex Karp Markets Palantir (And Why It Works)

23:47 Why Nobody Understands "Ontology": Palantir Buzzwords Decoded

24:51 Do You Really Need Forward Deployed Engineers?

27:55 Why Construction Is Really an Insurance Industry

29:14 Palantir in Construction: Cavtera, McCarthy and the Data Play

31:37 Higharc's $95M Series C to Replace AutoCAD (Marc Minor)

33:32 How Higharc Serves Home Builders at Scale

37:02 Higharc's Business Model and Home Building Challenges

40:00 Homes as Data: Inside the Higharc x USLBM Deal

46:02 World Cup Banter: US Football and Officiating

46:41 Is Football the World's Greatest Sport? The Debate

49:08 OpenSpace Spatial AI: Agents That See the Jobsite (Jeevan Kalanithi)

55:16 Data Centres and the AI Delusion Killing Startups

01:07:04 What 10 Years as CEO Taught Jeevan Kalanithi

"Even the most digitized job sites still have a binder and a filing cabinet in the trailer." — Juliana Richard Butler, Procore

We sat down with Procore's Director of Product for Quality, Safety, and Media as part of our ongoing series on the state of construction safety technology.

Her take cuts through a lot of the AI hype: paper isn't going anywhere soon, and the real unlock is reducing friction, not adding more forms.

✅ NFC-enabled Studson helmets can surface certifications with a single tap, no wallet required

✅ Procore's newly acquired Datagrid AI is built to support human intuition on the jobsite, not replace it

✅ Healthcare's forced interoperability offers lessons for construction, but construction's openness to new tools is the advantage healthcare doesn't have

✅ The best safety tech buyers plan 2-3 years out, not around a single RFP

Watch now on Youtube and Spotify.

Our free Construction Safety Report. Download your copy here: https://bricks-bytes.com/downloads/construction-safety/

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:30 How to fix safety on construction sites

01:13 What construction can learn from healthcare safety

04:43 How mobile apps are changing construction safety

07:39 Is construction safety actually digitised yet?

10:23 What safety software really does on site

14:18 Why workers don't adopt safety technology

19:15 The real reason safety tech doesn't get used

24:20 Where Procore fits in construction safety

29:16 How AI will change construction safety

29:17 Will AI replace safety managers?

31:41 Using technology to prevent site accidents

35:08 How to build a safety culture on site

38:55 Why psychological safety matters in construction

39:50 How customers shape safety technology

45:28 Compliance vs productivity in safety tech

50:37 How to choose the right safety technology

"We don't see the real costs of AI."

That's Jean-Marc Frangos, ex-BT in Silicon Valley, now running AI at Shimizu, one of Japan's "Big 5" contractors, founded in 1804.

We sat down with him to unpack how a 220 year old builder actually rolls out AI across a 20,000 person workforce.

The playbook, not the hype:

✅ Start with your data, not the model

✅ 5,000+ staff on one AI platform in ~7 months

✅ When the subsidies end, undisciplined teams get hit "like a ton of bricks"

🎧 Full episode out now.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

00:00 Intro

00:33 Inside Japanese construction and innovation

05:58 What is a "genecon"? Shimizu and Japan's super contractors

07:49 Sponsors

10:58 From telecom to construction: Jean-Marc's career path

17:11 Japan vs Silicon Valley: how innovation actually happens

22:49 How Japanese construction trains its workforce

27:21 How Shimizu adopts AI and new technology

33:26 Why AI adoption in construction is accelerating

36:11 Specialized AI tools vs general models

38:03 RAG explained: AI data retrieval in construction

41:34 AI model routing to cut costs

43:56 Rolling out AI across a large organization

47:55 AI governance: tracking ROI and real benefits

55:39 The future of construction robotics

59:19 The cultural roots of Japan's innovation mindset

📩 Subscribe to the Bricks & Bytes Newsletter: https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/🌐 Visit our website: http://bricks-bytes.com/📲 Follow us: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bricks-bytes/ Twitter: https://x.com/bricksbytespod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bricksbytes/Enjoying the insights? Hit that Subscribe button to stay ahead in construction tech, AI, and the future of how we build.

This week's briefing covers three conversations every construction leader should sit with.

Ryan Maibach runs Barton Malow, a five billion dollar builder with over a hundred years of history. He is turning work away in the best market his firm has ever seen, and that is not the surprising part. The surprising part is what worries him most. A large chunk of what builders get paid for is knowing things the client does not. If AI hands that knowledge to the client directly, what exactly are you selling?

Rob Painter runs Trimble and arrives at the same warning from the other side. Construction got faster task by task and never fixed the system those tasks sit inside. His read on AI is identical, and his advice to any CEO trying to navigate it is blunt. You cannot delegate understanding the thing that is about to reshape your business.

And then Ukraine. Not the war as you have seen it on the news, but what is being built underneath it. A country that moved from software to world leading drone technology out of necessity is now positioning construction tech as the next step. The rebuild has not started yet, because you cannot rebuild what you have not counted, and something new gets destroyed even as you are counting it.

Three conversations. One question running through all of them.

Join the argument in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

Ukraine's reconstruction has been estimated at $588 billion by the World Bank's Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA5), although our guest argues the true figure is likely higher.In this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we speak with Oleg Demydenko, Chair of Ukraine's National ConTech Cluster, about the technologies, engineering approaches and digital systems emerging during Ukraine's reconstruction.We also discuss:* Why Ukraine's reconstruction is currently estimated at $588 billion (World Bank RDNA5)* How new infrastructure is being designed with modular, distributed and replaceable systems* Why Oleg says, "We have no time to sell it. We've already developed a new one."* NVIDIA's AI factory in Ukraine* Why Patric Hellermann believes humanoid robots are an overhyped investment category* Agility Robotics going public via a SPAC after deploying around 100 humanoid robotsIf you're interested in construction, construction technology, AI, robotics, infrastructure and venture capital, this episode explores the ideas, technologies and investment themes discussed by our panel.#construction #constructiontechnology #contech #ukraine #ai #robotics #infrastructure #venturecapitalOur Sponsors:BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.coAphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.coArchdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.comChapters00:00 Intro00:58 What We're Building for the ConTech Community02:01 Wispr Flow Voice AI: Owen's Honest Take03:29 Agility Robotics SPAC: Should Robots Go Public?05:50 How Much Is a Humanoid Robot Actually Worth?09:29 Humanoid Robotics: The Problems Nobody Talks About13:32 Can Humanoid Robots Be Used in War?16:01 Rebuilding Ukraine: The $588 Billion Plan23:32 How the War Is Changing Construction Technology27:36 Modular Steel That Protects Ukraine's Power Grid30:14 Designing Buildings to Survive Attacks32:46 Why Modular Construction Is the Future36:25 How Much of Ukraine Is Actually Destroyed?40:17 Ukrainian Founders: Stop Changing Your Name43:57 Is the Ukraine War Reaching a Turning Point?

"WhatsApp's the most successful construction technology tool ever built."

Half a joke, but only half.

That's what Prakash Senghani, Co-Founder and CEO of Navatech, told us on the latest Bricks & Bytes.

His point: the workers who most need safety tech are the ones it never reaches.

So instead of forcing them onto another clunky app, Navatech put its AI inside the tool they already use, in their own language, by voice, or from a photo.

A few things that stuck with us:

Most "digital transformation" in safety is just paper on a screenYou can't prove a negative, which makes safety ROI brutally hard to show

The scariest competitor isn't Procore or Autodesk, it's customers building their own tools with AI

Full episode out now. 🎧

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our free Construction Safety Report. Download your copy here: https://bricks-bytes.com/downloads/construction-safety/

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters0:00 Teaser

1:24 Intro – Why Safety Tech Matters in Construction

4:10 What Poor Safety Really Costs You

5:42 Sponsors

8:43 What Poor Safety Really Costs You (cont.)

10:04 Why Compliance-Only Safety Falls Short

13:16 How Construction Safety Training Is Changing

16:20 Using Technology to Manage Site Safety

19:19 Automating Safety Data Capture

22:17 Bringing Advanced Tech Into Safety

25:24 Getting Crews to Actually Use Safety Software

28:28 Inside the Safety Tech Market

31:08 How to Choose the Right Safety Software

34:08 The Future of Construction Safety Tech

"I don't see this as a technology problem. I see it as a human problem."

That's Rob Painter, CEO of Trimble, on what's really holding back AI in construction

In this episode he made the case that:

✅ Task productivity is largely solved, system productivity is the real unlock

✅ AI is overhyped and underhyped at the same time, the difference is industry context

✅ The barrier to AI value is organizational, not technical: "It's not AI for the sake of AI"

✅ Across 100+ acquisitions, the thesis still fails if the culture and the people don't work

Full conversation on build vs buy vs partner, the Document Crunch deal, and how he runs Trimble. Link in comments.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Trimble Inc: linkedin.com/company/trimble

Trimble Construction: linkedin.com/company/trimbleconstruction

Trimble Civil Construction: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trimble-heavy-civil-construction

Docu Crunch: linkedin.com/company/document-crunch/

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:01 Quickfire: Getting to Know the Trimble CEO

03:15 Why Is Construction Productivity So Low?

06:05 How Venture Capital Works in Construction Tech

09:05 What Construction CEOs Actually Want From Tech

12:11 What CEOs Really Say Behind Closed Doors

13:59 Build vs Buy: Acquire or Build In-House?

18:38 What 120 Acquisitions Taught Trimble

20:07 Trimble's AI Strategy Explained

25:54 Is AI Actually Worth It in Construction?

27:59 How AI Drives Productivity and New Revenue

30:18 AI in Construction: Hype vs Reality

32:49 How Hardware and Software Connect on the Jobsite

37:51 How to Actually Innovate in Construction Tech

39:16 Rob Painter's Leadership Philosophy

41:37 Staying Connected While Running a Huge Company

44:23 What a CEO Learns From Other Leaders

47:47 Finding Balance in Nature

SpaceX just paid $60 billion for Cursor.

On this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Patric wasn't buying the logic:

"Why in the world would you buy an independent gas station chain and think that makes you more competitive with your bigger oil producing rival?"

His take: Cursor is a reseller of tokens. Owning it doesn't make you a better model company — just a bigger, more exposed gas station.

We also dug into Autodesk's $3.6B MaintainX deal, why Palantir won't win construction, and the $8 trillion data center buildout.

Full episode out now. 🎧

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

00:00 Intro

01:31 How LinkedIn Is Changing Professional Communication

04:58 Why Construction Industry Data Can Be Misleading

08:48 Using Social Media for Professional Networking

12:44 Latest Construction Technology Developments

16:34 SpaceX Acquires Cursor: Industry Reaction

20:29 The Future of Tech Acquisitions and M&A

24:25 Residential Construction Software Explained

28:09 Construction Market Trends and Outlook

29:47 How the Global Economy Impacts Construction

33:00 Data Center Construction and Local Regulations

40:36 The Future of Construction Design Software

48:56 Corporate Skilled Trades Training Programs

51:56 IPOs, 401(k)s, and Investment Risk

52:47 Rethinking Retirement and Midlife

55:10 The Future of AI in Construction

56:44 Market Dynamics and Financial Deregulation

59:29 Tech Valuations and Market Sentiment

1:02:50 Construction Trade Technology Innovations

1:05:27 AI in Structural Engineering and Quality Assurance

The most overhyped term in construction tech right now? "AI-native startup."

That's the take from Geoff Lewis, SVP of Product Management at Procore

and co-founder of Honest Buildings (acquired by Procore), who joined

us on Bricks & Bytes to talk about how an incumbent fights back in the

AI era.

Tune in to find out about:

✅ Why Procore says it has already neutralised the speed advantage of AI-native startups

✅ The submittal-checking agent that collapsed weeks of review into hours

✅ Geoff's five-year bet on autonomous agents running RFIs end to end

✅ Inside Procore's new capital planning and portfolio suite built for owners

🎧 Watch now on Spotify and YouTube. Link in the comments below!

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:16 Introduction and Quickfire Questions

04:05 AI in Construction: Adoption and Challenges

12:18 Procore's Product Strategy and Customer Focus

16:57 AI Implementation and Future Prospects

23:38 Sponsors

25:39 AI Implementation and Future Prospects (cont.)

26:44 The Rise of AI Native Startups

29:28 AI Tools for Contractors

32:11 The Future of AI in Construction

34:15 Palantir vs. Procore: A Comparative Analysis

43:03 Procore's New Offerings for Owners

50:12 Lessons from Product Management Failures

"Every GC is one poorly managed incident away from wiping out the entire

profit for the project."

That line from Simon Elliott, CEO of Breadcrumb, set the tone for one of

the sharpest conversations we've had on construction safety tech.

We sat down with Simon to dig into why most safety tools miss the point,

and why the real unlock isn't compliance, it's productivity.

Tune in to find out about:

✅ Why "safety third" is the uncomfortable reality on many US job sites

✅ The hidden cost of the superintendent turning up at 3am just to clear paperwork

✅ What actually changes on site from day one to six months after going digital

✅ Why trusted field data is becoming the foundation for AI in construction

▶️ Watch on YouTube and Spotify.

Our free Construction Safety Report. Download your copy here: https://bricks-bytes.com/downloads/construction-safety/

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

00:00 Teaser

01:05 Introduction to Safety Technology in Construction

06:07 The Importance of Safety and Compliance

10:50 Technology's Role in Enhancing Safety

16:06 From Compliance to Productivity

21:02 Implementing Breadcrumb: A Case Study

30:58 The Future of Safety Technology

32:05 Integrating Technology in Construction

38:14 The Importance of Data in Safety Technology

42:04 Target Customers and Market Dynamics

51:01 Navigating the Competitive Landscape

56:57 The Future of Safety Technology in Construction

A VC fell asleep for 30+ minutes during a founder's pitch.

The round stillclosed.

This week on Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we traded the VC horror stories founders never forget, debated whether the hottest AI startups are just "reselling tokens," and brought on three founders fresh off funding rounds: Guy Saxelby (Earlytrade, $25M total raised), Adrian Rhaese (EnvioTech, €1M pre-seed) and Ben Waters (LightTable, $22M Series A).

Tune in to find out about:

✅ Why Patrick calls Lovable, Cursor and Vercel "resellers of tokens" and what that means for their valuations

✅ How Earlytrade automates construction payments, with 10% of revenue already running with zero humans

✅ The streetlight startup saving cities 80% on energy while mapping how a whole city moves

✅ Dustin's no-mercy pushback on what it actually takes to be a "platform for pre-construction"

Listen now on Spotify and YouTube.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction#constructiontech #ai #vcChapters00:00 Intro

01:10 VC Horror Stories Founders Never Share

07:05 The Weirdest VC Behaviour We've Seen

13:01 Why AI Costs Are Eating Your Margins

19:15 Will AI Companies Ever IPO?

25:49 How to Find Early Product-Market Fit

33:24 Expanding Internationally: What Actually Works

40:09 Where Construction Tech Innovation Happens

45:48 The Growth Playbook for the Next 5 Years

56:56 The Hardest Lessons of Entrepreneurship

58:11 Why Timing Beats Everything in Business

58:19 How Perception Shapes Professional Success

59:10 Why Being Eccentric Is a Branding Advantage

01:02:07 Where Tech Meets Construction

01:04:09 AI That Actually Manages Construction Projects

01:10:10 Why Pre-Construction Is Where the Money Is

01:16:16 Mastering the Critical Path

"We have 2,000 agents going through your document, checking every single item in detail."

This week we sat down with Brandon Smith and Raymond Zhao, co-founders of Structured AI, fresh off a $4.2M seed round they closed in just five days.

Tune in to find out about:

✅ How Brandon went from training an AI fighter jet at 17 to building construction AI after a single Reddit message

✅ Why agentic AI finally cracks drawing review when traditional machine learning never could

✅ The deterministic, no-confidence-score system with a full audit trail your team can sign off on

✅ Where this goes next - an AI coworker that fixes errors straight back into your Revit model

🎧 Watch now on YouTube and Spotify.

#aec #construction #constructiontech #bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #ai #vc

"I currently haven't found a use case in which I haven't been able to build."

That was Brett Adams on what Palantir Foundry can do in construction.

This week on Bricks & Bytes we sat down with Dan Julien (Chief Revenue Officer) and Brett Adams (Forward Deployed Engineer and Head of Construction) of ForgeSight, the i4C born team implementing Palantir Foundry across the AEC industry, to cut through the rumours about what Palantir is actually doing in construction.

Tune in to find out about:

✅ Whether Palantir Foundry can really replace your ERP

✅ What "forward deployed engineering" actually means on a job site

✅ Whether Procore, Autodesk and Trimble survive a Palantir world

✅ How a contractor rebuilt its entire operation on Foundry in roughly a year

🎧 Watch now on Spotify and YouTube

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

00:18 What Is Palantir & Why Construction?

02:36 Palantir Foundry Explained

05:16 Who You Need to Implement It

08:35 Do You Actually Need Palantir?

11:01 Real Use Cases in Construction

13:19 How to Implement Foundry & Integrate Data

22:00 Sponsor

25:01 Getting Your Data Into Foundry

28:40 How Long Does Implementation Take?

30:31 Solving Software Integration Challenges

33:06 Can Foundry Replace Your ERP?

36:22 The Future of ERP vs Palantir (SAP, Oracle)

39:31 Palantir for Non-Technical Teams

42:58 Case Study: How Kavanaugh Uses Foundry

46:02 How Much Does Palantir Cost?

48:03 Who Foundry Is Actually For

49:41 Use Cases for On-Site Workers

56:12 Solving Common Operational Headaches

Seven men carrying one 140kg steel bar, on the biggest infrastructure project in Britain. The founder of Laing O'Rourke saw it and concluded that in fifty years, nothing had changed.

This week's Executive Briefing is about the man he hired to fix it. Chetan Kotur designed cars at Volvo, launched Polestar globally, then spent three and a half years looking at construction with outsider's eyes. At our private fireside in London this week, he shared his diagnosis on the record for the first time.

In this briefing:

• The industry that innovates daily or dies, versus the industry that fears innovation might kill it
• Why nobody in construction checks what competitors are doing (and what Polestar did instead)
• 56% of construction injuries are musculoskeletal. No other industry still accepts this
• Hinkley Point C: how a precision rebar factory turned a month of work into a single shift
• The pattern across Europe: Laing O'Rourke's lab, Bouygues' Scale One, Vinci's hired field, and why testing grounds are multiplying as construction's innovation wave goes physical
• From a Paris stage: investor Patric (Foundamental) on why tech aimed at 2% of construction's cost base was always going to disappoint
• The two questions that expose a weak tech vendor in five minutes
• A first look at our State of Construction Safety Tech report, landing next week: incidents consume 4 to 6% of project cost in an industry running 2 to 3% margins

A venture capitalist walks into a bar.

"I'll have what everyone else is having."

Patrick told that joke about his own profession on this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, and it set up the sharpest exchange of the episode: venture stopped backing hard problems and started buying momentum.

We're joined by Alain Waha, CTO of Buro Happold, and Richard Fifita, CEO of Veyor, fresh off a $7.5M Series A, alongside Dustin DeVan.

What we get into:

→ Autodesk's $3.6 billion all cash acquisition of MaintainX, and why Dustin, who watched this strategy take shape from inside Autodesk, says it all leads back to the digital twin

→ "Knowledge arbitrage": Alain's framework for what stays defensible when knowledge becomes computable

→ Why construction robotics needs systems integrators more than it needs humanoids

→ How Veyor went from backed up concrete trucks to managing deliveries at JFK, SFO and major data center projects

Full episode is live now on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:30 Introduction and Technical Challenges

03:21 Live Streaming and Event Experiences

06:13 Autodesk's Acquisition of MaintainX

11:50 Data Ownership and Predictability in Construction

16:23 Knowledge Arbitrage in Engineering and Robotics

20:00 Exploring Knowledge Arbitrage in Robotics

22:06 The Role of Systems Integration in Construction Robotics

22:54 Challenges in Robotics for Construction Trades

24:16 Collaborative Robots: The Future of Construction

25:59 The Disconnect Between Innovation and AI in Construction

27:30 Testing Software vs. Materials in Construction

27:45 The Reluctance to Experiment in Construction Tech

29:52 Capital Efficiency and Technology Adoption in Construction

32:49 The Venture Capital Landscape and Its Challenges

36:33 The Future of Venture Capital in Technology

44:46 Innovative Event Planning in Construction Technology

47:26 Branding and Customer Perception in Construction

48:11 Disruption in Construction: Insights from Automotive Industry

51:09 Bouygues' Innovation Lab: A New Era for Construction

51:53 Introducing Richard: Veyor's Journey and Innovations

56:59 Streamlining Material Management in Construction

01:01:58 Challenges in Construction Scheduling and Delivery

01:05:36 The Aussie Tech Scene in Austin, Texas

"AI won't help you if you're still using clunky software with a six-month learning curve." – Anita Venkiteswaran, E3 Tech

In today's episode of Bricks and Bytes, we sat down with Anita, the driving force behind E3 Tech's AI-powered M&A strategy in construction, alongside two of her platform companies: Rob Metz (Sylvan) and Chris Weaver (Egan).

Tune in to hear about:

✓ Why 25,000+ specialty contractors represent a massive M&A opportunity

✓ How AI is finally solving construction's 40-year productivity decline

✓ What jobsite credibility really means for founders building construction tech

✓ Why unified AI systems beat fragmented "point solutions" every time

Available now on Spotify and YouTube.

#aec #construction #constructiontech #bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:39 Introduction to E3's Model and AI in M&A

07:41 Identifying Ideal Acquisition Targets

10:34 The Role of Technology in Modern Construction

13:45 The Entrepreneur in Residence Model

16:35 The Impact of AI on Construction Efficiency

19:52 Building Relationships with AI Startups

22:29 The Future of AI in Construction

31:59 Leveraging AI for Contract Management

32:42 The Evolution of VDC and BIM in Construction

34:14 Enhancing Processes with Robotics and AI

35:38 Attracting Talent through Technology

36:38 AI Amplifying Human Expertise

38:35 Transitioning Businesses and Succession Planning

40:12 Navigating Business Ownership Transitions

42:42 The Necessity of Adapting to Change

46:41 Lessons Learned from Technological Implementation

48:18 The Future of AI in Construction

53:44 The Importance of Unified AI Solutions

55:31 Integrating AI with Emerging Technologies

58:27 Opportunities for Collaboration in the Industry

"$75M in 13 months. a16z just led their Series A."

We sat down with Niklas Lindgren, Co-Founder & CEO of Endra, fresh off their $50M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, taking total funding to $75M in 13 months.

Endra is building the purpose-built workspace for MEP engineering, already partnering with AtkinsRéalis, Buro Happold, WSP, Hoare Lea, Ramboll and AFRY.

Tune in to find out about:

✅ Why a16z led at Series A instead of waiting for later traction

✅ The Stripe vs PayPal analogy behind Endra's category play (and why they're not replacing Revit)

✅ The honest answer to the billable-hours paradox

✅ What this means for the next generation of MEP graduates

Watch now on Spotify and YouTube 🎧

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Missed an episode of the Executive Briefing last month? This is your ten-minute catch-up.

Four stories from the last four weeks, what each one means for your business, and which are worth going back to in full.

Inside:

• The new kind of buyer circling construction, and why they want your firm, not your tech
• The market split the banks have started to price in
• The contractor who killed his ERP, his dispatch system and his time cards, and rebuilt on one platform
• Why AI got 280 times cheaper while everyone's bills went up

No longer form this week (I have been busy in France!! - more on that soon). Just the month that mattered, in plain English, for people who run construction businesses.

Which of the four hit hardest? Tell us in the comments on the LinkedIn post.