Bricks And Bytes

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...

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...

"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.

...

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...

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<...

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 CE...

“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...

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...

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...

"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 yo...

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...

"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

✅...

"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 fa...

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...

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...

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...

$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...

"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...

"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...

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...

"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...

"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...

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."

"...

"I can make you something that looks like it's really expensive, but it took me four hours."

Dustin Burns, SVP of Technology at McCownGordon Construction, on the 

software demo you just sat through.

He built a cost history web app. Their real cost data, region benchmarking, conceptual estimates. One HTML file. 

Four hours.

His verdict: "And it is vaporware."

The point isn't that it was bad. It's that from the outside, you can't tell anymore.

So he looks for the ones building their own models, not t...

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...

"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...

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...

"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...

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...

$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 Seri...

"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 bui...

"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.

#bricksand...

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...

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."...

"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...

"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...

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. 🎧

...

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...

"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...

This week's briefing covers three shifts every construction leader should be watching.

Workplace incidents in construction eat four to six percent of project cost. The average contractor makes two to three percent margin. That single comparison changes how you should think about safety technology, and this week the Bricks and Bytes State of Construction Safety Tech report goes live to prove it.

Owen breaks down what touches your P&L: why your safety records are turning into a financial asset insurers will price off, why your next major client may force this tech on you...