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 Planning activity dipped in June, several high profile projects have been cancelled or withdrawn, and local opposition is increasingly influencing what gets built.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 simply a pause or the start of a broader shift.

Next, we unpack Arcadis' latest International Construction Costs report, why UK construction has become one of the most expensive markets in the world, and how the balance of power may be shifting from clients to contractors.

Finally, we revisit the AI pricing battle as new models, open weight releases and changing enterprise economics reshape the market. We also discuss Microsoft's warning on AI, data ownership and what construction businesses should be thinking about before committing to long term AI strategies.

Plus, we cover Monumental's $32M funding round, TerraFirma's $100M Series A, and the business lessons from NFL quarterback Jake Browning's demolition company.

"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, Bucks & Bytes, we asked him:

→ Why he stays away from structural demo (for now)

→ How low overhead wins bids without change order games

→ Why he'd rather face a third and long blitz than a late paying GC

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #construction #constructiontech #aec

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:36 NFL Construction Trivia

03:25 NFL Players Who Own Construction Companies

06:12 The Biggest NFL Stadiums Ever Built

09:05 SoFi Stadium Construction Cost: $2.6B to $5.5B

11:57 Jake Browning Joins the Show

13:17 Playing QB for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers

15:11 Why an NFL Player Started a Demolition Company

17:34 Starting a Business With One $30,000 Truck

22:11 How Athletes Should Invest Their Money

27:21 NFL Lessons for Running a Business

30:12 Finding Your Competitive Advantage

37:14 How to Bid Demolition Jobs

42:19 Leadership Lessons From the NFL

42:48 Why Athletes Struggle to Monetize Their Brand

44:14 How to Win Work With General Contractors

45:28 Why Being Normal Wins in Construction

47:17 The Best NFL Stadiums to Play In

49:19 The Scariest Player in the NFL

51:32 Inside Sutter Street Demolition

55:26 Growing a Demolition Business the Right Way

🎧 Listen to the Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3P7JkiN9X3N4Kh6jlDsOgi?si=91JP5nxvQbKStkp8AQdAOg 📩 Subscribe to the Bricks & Bytes Newsletter: https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/🌐 Visit our website: http://bricks-bytes.com/📲 Follow us: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bricks-bytes/ Twitter: https://x.com/bricksbytespod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bricksbytes/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.comEnjoying the insights? Hit that Subscribe button to stay ahead in construction tech, AI, and the future of how we build.

"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 acquisition, so she has seen exactly what earns coverage and what gets deleted from a journalist's inbox.

A few things that stuck with us:

Events are still the number one marketing channel in construction, but only if you do the work before you land at the venue.

Muck Rack's research found that the overwhelming majority of AI citations come from earned media. If journalists are not writing about you, ChatGPT is not talking about you either.

If you have ever sent out a "we now integrate with X" press release, this episode is for you. Full conversation on YouTube and Spotify now.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #constructiontech #construction #aec #ai

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:17 How PR Works in Construction Technology

03:50 PR Strategy Explained: The Communications Triangle

06:44 What Makes a Story Newsworthy?

09:34 Common PR Mistakes Startups Make

10:22 Sponsors

13:23 Why Most PR Announcements Get Ignored

15:44 How to Build Relationships With Journalists

18:38 How Startups Get Featured in Major Publications

21:28 How Speaking at Industry Events Builds Your Brand

24:29 In-Person vs Virtual Events: Which Works Best?

27:36 How Media Relations Builds Long-Term Credibility

28:55 Construction Tech PR Case Study: Document Crunch

30:59 How to Announce a Startup Acquisition

36:11 PR Strategy for Seed-Stage Startups

40:26 Founder-Led Marketing and Personal Branding

45:23 Public Speaking Tips for Startup Founders

48:00 The Future of PR and Marketing

54:16 What PR Will Look Like in 2028

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

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 words:

"The Series A was basically still like an R&D round... we had some prototypes, we had some like demoware basically."

"The Series B was raised off actual success."

And the line that will start arguments:

"Everyone is obsessed with speed. Speed doesn't really matter."

A bricklaying robot company telling you speed doesn't matter. His reasoning is worth the listen on its own.

Also in this one:

> Why SAM and Hadrian X were too early, and what changed

> Day zero to day one of a robot crew arriving on site

> The economics vs a traditional bricklaying gang

> UK going commercial, US pilots starting this year

> Why the entire facade is next. Not in a decade, within a couple of years.

🚨 Industry exclusive. Link in comments.

#bricksandbytes #constructiontech #aec #ai #vc

"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't that it was bad. It's that from the outside, you can't tell anymore.

So he looks for the ones building their own models, not the ones wrapping someone else's API.

Full episode with Dustin Burns is live now. Link below!

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #construction

#constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

00:50 The Stress Beard (And Why He Shaves Every Morning)

03:03 Should Construction Companies Build Their Own Software?

05:29 What AI Actually Looks Like Inside a $1B Contractor

08:32 AI Sprawl: Governing Tools Your Team Builds Without You

10:50 Reality Capture, Laser Scanning and Drones on the Jobsite

14:10 Construction Robotics: Building a Robot for Under $5K

16:21 Sponsors

19:21 AI Estimating: When Your Client Prices the Job Without You

22:39 The Silver Tsunami and Construction's Knowledge Transfer Problem

27:29 Voice AI in the Field: Less Typing, More Talking

30:25 Why a Safety Checklist Has No Value to a Superintendent

32:03 Emerging Construction Technology Worth Watching

34:30 How to Actually Sell Construction Software to a GC

36:19 Getting Pitched 10 AI Tools a Week

37:39 How to Spot an AI Wrapper (And Why Most Demos Are Vaporware)

40:05 Construction 2037: What the Jobsite Looks Like in 11 Years

45:16 Humans and Robots on the Same Jobsite

48:03 AI Governance Insurance: The Next SDI?

49:55 Automated Progress Tracking: The Problem Nobody Has Solved

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

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 clipboard, still ringing round to find out where the excavator is. One firm he works with lost twenty million dollars of equipment in a single year without knowing it. The cost of not digitising is not zero. You just cannot see the bill yet.

Then KPMG surveyed over two thousand senior executives across twenty countries. Nearly a third said they had no idea where their growing AI costs were coming from. MIT looked at corporate AI projects and found ninety five percent of them fail, not on the technology, but on the groundwork nobody did. The AI worked. The organisation around it did not.

And the data centre boom, the thing keeping order books healthy while housing sits flat, is starting to slip. Not because the money has dried up. The four biggest tech companies are spending north of six hundred and fifty billion dollars this year alone. It is slipping because the wait for transformers and switchgear has stretched from two years to five. You can have the land, the funding and the chips and still not be able to build.

The same problem is underneath all three. And construction, the industry everyone calls backward, already knows what it is.

Drop your answer in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

"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 sell you agents unless you let them train your team first

✅ The shift from point solution to a "system of action" that sits on top of Procore and Autodesk

✅ Why a new AI takeoff startup seems to launch every week, and why most break on the last 20%

✅ Her blunt line on vibe coded tools: "Don't come on the market with something that Claude can already do."

Plus: a structural engineer breaks down the Midtown column buckling, and SubBase's Eric Helitzer on why a fintech led his $7M Series A.

🎧 Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:55 Introduction and Welcome

03:55 Trunk Tools Update and Series B Insights

06:46 Evolution of Trunk Tools: From Co-Pilot to System of Action

09:53 Challenges in Understanding Construction Drawings

12:52 Integration with Systems of Record

15:44 Building Trust in AI Agents

18:44 The Landscape of AI Startups in Construction

27:01 The Surge of AI in Outreach

28:07 Innovation in Construction Technology

32:35 Collaboration vs Competition in AI

34:44 Efficiency Gains in Construction

39:28 The Shift in AI Adoption

43:48 Future of Construction Tech and AI

47:58 Innovations in Construction Technology

49:33 Challenges in Construction Tech

50:16 The Future of Construction Tech

53:29 Structural Integrity and Engineering Insights

01:01:19 Funding and Growth in Construction Startups

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

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