Bricks And Bytes

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

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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