Bricks And Bytes

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...

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 U...

"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...

"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 organiz...

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 exp...

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 ad...

"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: ✅...

Spotify Description 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 g...

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)...

"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...

"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 thro...

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'...

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...

"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: ✓...

"$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...

"You could get 60 reviews of a pizza in six seconds, but finding a new contractor takes 12 months and spreadsheets." That's how Riggs Kubiak described the construction industry in 2011 when he started Honest Buildings as a marketplace to connect owners with contractors. It didn't work. The pivot? A project management platform that became so valuable, Procore acquired it. We sat d...

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 di...