Bricks And Bytes

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...

"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. T...

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 p...

"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...

"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 Initial...

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, quie...

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 g...

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 fu...

$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 Kev...

"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 servi...

"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 th...

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...

"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...

"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 acq...

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...

"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...

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...

"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 se...

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...

"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 everycont...

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 ab...

$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 pus...

"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...

"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...

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...