Bricks And Bytes

Can an owner be their own architect?

Altaf Ganihar says owners and developers are now asking Snaptrude exactly that.

Alain Waha's answer: the design team's deliverable "ain't a set of drawings" anyway.

Also in this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes:

Dustin DeVan on why takeoff isn't the hardest problem in precon

Autodesk University and Groundbreak in the same week of 2027

Nomadic Drones, whose drones land and recharge on live power lines

So who moves first, the architect or their client?

Full episode live on...

“Show me you can use these tools to 10x your productivity and you got a job. I don’t care how old you are, I don’t really care what college you went to.”

In today’s episode of Bricks & Bytes we have Patrick Murphy. Youngest member of Congress at 29, now founder of Togal.AI and chief investment officer at Coastal Construction, a $7.5bn pipeline contractor in Miami.

Here’s what we cover:

Why one click takeoff doesn’t exist, straight from someone selling AI takeoff

How many of the AI takeoff startu...

This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at where construction is actually heading.

First, Boston. Suffolk, a 13 billion dollar privately held contractor, opened a 50 million dollar innovation facility called 100MAG in Roxbury this week. Inside it sits their in-house design and engineering team, a materials sourcing arm, a venture fund, an accelerator, and AI engineers embedded directly into live project teams. John Fish, who founded Suffolk and has run it for four decades, built the evening around one line. The cost to build a building today...

Should founders take advice from investors who have never run a company?

Owen's view on this week's Bricks, Bucks and Bytes was blunt: it's like hiring a personal trainer who has never stepped on a treadmill.

Maria Davidson spent eight years building Kojo in what she calls construction's "hard mode". She has now launched Relational Capital, a $50M solo GP fund writing $1M to $5M cheques at pre seed and seed.

Also on the show, Bedrock Robotics co-founder and CTO Kevin Peterson on how a company founded in 2024 just raised $600M at a $4.1...

Architecture firms forget every project the day it finishes.

The detail that caused an RFI goes back into the library unfixed, and turns up on the next job with the same problem attached.

In today’s episode of Bricks & Bytes, Ross Wagner from Pirros joined us to unpack why it keeps happening, and what an AI project hub actually changes.

What we learnt:

* Why firms forget every project the day it finishes, and how a bad detail carries its RFI onto the next job

* What Pirros does as an AI...

This week's briefing covers three things that matter more than the headlines suggest.

First, America. The Architecture Billings Index came in at 44.7 in September, down from 47.2 in August and the largest share of firms reporting falling billings since May. Signed design contracts fell to 43.7. Enquiries are still positive at 53.2, which means clients are asking but not committing. AIA describes the index as a leading indicator for non-residential construction nine to twelve months out. What architects are not signing now is work you will not be bidding next autumn. On the other side, JLL puts 317 million square feet...

Twelve months ago, Zaid Kahn said the words "knowledge graph" to us in a Boston office.

We nodded. We had no idea what he meant.

So we brought him back, with Bogdan Arsintescu, who sat on the original Google Knowledge Graph team and later ran graph systems at LinkedIn and Microsoft.

The ask was simple. Explain it like we're five.

 A knowledge graph is a set of facts. Subject, predicate, object. "Door 105 has a 45 minute fire rating."

 An ontology is the rulebook. Everyone agreeing what every symbol on a dr...

This week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same underlying question. Are construction businesses actually prepared for what is coming at them?

First, the productivity number nobody wants to say out loud. Buildots Intelligence Lab published its first global construction benchmarks report this week, built on data from over 200 live projects across housing, offices, hospitals and data centres. On a typical project, crews deliver 63% of their planned production rate. The best quarter of projects reach 79%, which still means losing a full day every single week. But here is...

Manufacturing in Europe runs 267 robots per 10,000 workers. Construction runs close to zero.

That gap is why we are hosting Groundworks on 11 November. It is also why Origin exists.

Yogesh Ghaturle joined Bricks, Bucks & Bytes the day Origin came out of stealth with $20M to put autonomous robots to work on interior construction.

Why the last wave of drywall robots failed, and what has changed since

The throughput question every contractor asks before anything else

US contractors want to rent. European contractors want to buy the outcome.

Martin's...

Which construction tech is the industry wasting money on?

We put that to Stuart Drahota at DPR Construction and he didn't dodge it: progress tracking and deviation analysis. In his words, "we're not quite there yet."

His reasoning: there's a real gap between what project teams expect from these tools and the effort it takes to make them work on a live job.

Agree, or are we being too harsh? 

We also got into:

The digital dig board his team is now piloting across 15 DPR projects

 Why he...

Startups are paying thousands for AEC conference booths and asking what they actually got for it.

AEC conference season is here, and almost nobody we talk to is coming home from these events happy.

On this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Dustin told us where Ediphi's event budget is going next year:

 "I don't think we're gonna be spending money on these conferences."

Also on the episode:

• Why startups are skipping booths for side events and hyper-local customer hosting

• Autodesk promotes its Media & Entertainment lead to EVP of AEC<...

This week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same uncomfortable gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers.

Suffolk, one of the biggest contractors in the US, published a white paper with MIT’s Center for Real Estate and MIT Media Lab this week. They took a real building, a 118,000 square foot multi-family block in San Francisco that finished in 2024 at 179 million dollars, and ran six AI levers across it simultaneously. Design automation, offsite manufacturing, permitting, scheduling, labour and subcontracting, and supply chain. The model took...

Can a CEO tell you what their company bought last year?

In today's episode we have Eldar Sadikov, CEO of Field Materials. He says most contractors can't, and he estimates 15 to 20% of materials spend gets lost to the mess.

Around 25 to 30% of purchases are will calls, bought on the fly with no planned buyout behind them

He reckons 50% or more of contractors still pay suppliers by cheque

His bar for a good CEO: "the CEO should be in the position to go and query this."

Episode live on YouTube...

This week's briefing covers four things that landed in the same week, starting with a story about an intern, a spreadsheet and eighteen thousand snags.

Gene Hodge is Vice President of Innovation at Mortenson, a family owned American builder with 11 billion dollars of revenue and the tenth biggest contractor in America. He started his career printing off punch list items and walking the site with a pen. Twenty three years later, someone still walks the site with a list. His answer to why is that the industry is structurally fragmented, and the way past it is trust...

Autodesk now runs from the first sketch to the maintenance ticket.

So who is left to compete?

We got back from Autodesk University and put that question to three people this week:

Connor Watumull on Miter's $40M Series B, and why payroll was the way into the whole contractor back office.

Lea Scherer on Kuro's €10M seed, and how a two year old startup ended up working with Goldbeck and Hochtief Infrastructure.

Alain Waha, CTO of Buro Happold, on why AI could push software bills up from here.

...

A few years ago, Mortenson's own leadership group told them they were treating innovation "kind of like a hobby".

This year they're No. 10 on ENR's Top 400, running a 90,000 sq ft R&D facility and about to launch a joint venture with Goldbeck.

So we asked Gene Hodge, their VP of I4 and Innovation, how he proves the ROI on all of it:

"I think anyone asking what's the ROI on innovation is not interested in innovating, most likely."

CFOs, we'd love to hear you push back on this one.

...

Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back.

This week's briefing comes straight from Autodesk University in Las Vegas, the biggest technology conference in the AEC industry, where Owen was invited as part of the media and analyst cohort.

Three things stood out above everything else.

First, agents. Autodesk showed agents checking submittals against specifications, comparing subcontractor bids against scopes of work, and tracing the impact of a single RFI through a building model and into the project schedule. But...

"My data is too messy for AI."

We hear it on almost every call. Barry Chiu thinks it's the wrong way round.

Consider this a contractor's guide to data and AI.

Nobody has clean data at the raw level. Not one contractor.

You can't know how bad yours is until it's all in one place and you can put the systems side by side.

When you find that job numbers don't match across two systems, that's your first win, not a setback.

His line on it: "you're...

This week's briefing covers three things landing in the same week that construction leaders need to understand before they plan anything for the rest of the year.

First, interest rates. The European Central Bank raised rates for the second time this year on the tenth of September, to two and a half percent, with markets now pricing more than three further rises over the next twelve months. The US Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday the sixteenth, with traders putting the chance of a rise at around seventy percent. The Bank of England decides the day after, and...

Anthropic's own alignment lead says there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills us all within a decade.

He was backing up a researcher who'd just quit the company over exactly that.

On this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we read the entire doomsday scenario out loud: the data centres, the autonomous research, the whole thing.

Then we picked it apart.

Martin's take: it's a fairy tale that conveniently justifies more regulation.

Dustin's take: the AI can't even build its own infrastructure without us, so who's actually building the robots...

"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...

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...

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...