$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

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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