With a flood of new interest in construction technology from traditional venture capitalists and technology startups, many in the industry can feel burnt out from the relentless boosterism and showmanship of Silicon Valley elevator pitches. But beneath this cacophony is a general wave of adoption of new technologies, and many in the construction industry are dead set on not missing out.

全面解决方案公司投资的头条新闻最近已经恶化。Office Space Middleman Wunderkind WeWork今年早些时候看到了其200亿美元的IPO火焰，但这并不意味着对建筑技术的投资正在减弱。如果有的话，它正在加速增长。

While outside interest in construction funding has grown, long-term investors in construction technology are seeing the benefits of starting off with knowledge of the industry. “There are a lot of investors who don’t have a background in construction,” says Curtis Rodgers of construction-focused venture capital firm Brick & Mortar Ventures. “They don’t understand the constraints of the industry.”

罗杰斯解释说，建造产品需要花费时间，在建筑用户中真正采用的产品可能比其他行业要慢。他说：“当然，风险投资家写得太大的支票，以至于表现得太少。”这可能会对必须达到行业无法支持的增长目标的建筑技术初创公司产生不利影响。“筹集太多的钱是一件糟糕的交易 - 让自己感到很多幻想和痛苦。它使您陷入泡沫。”他说。

罗杰斯（Rodgers）建议初创企业不要追逐所谓的独角兽地位，而某些风险投资公司（VC）则追随的十倍增长。取而代之的是，他建议专注于建立客户并在建筑领域找到利基市场。有了Brick＆Mortar，Rodgers试图将新想法转向他们解决的具体问题。

足够的生长空间

咨询公司McKiney＆Company的合伙人Jose Luis Blanco说：“我一直告诉所有人的建设很重要。”“我们一直很孤立，现在您看到来自其他行业正在寻求建设的成功公司。”

尽管对建筑技术充满兴趣，但仍有障碍。研究表明，建筑公司在研发领域的投资比其他行业投资较小，而采用新技术的份额较慢，更分散。Blanco解释说：“与其他行业相比，技术投资非常低，但这就像车轮。”“一旦您开始旋转它，您将看到更多的好处，进步。投资将推动进一步的投资。”

Blanco说，尽管传统投资者已经建立了一些建筑技术公司，但仍存在真正的障碍。他说：“坦率地说，缔约国不受欢迎。”“这个行业并不缺乏好主意，但执行能力的缺乏。”尽管存在这些障碍，但麦肯锡研究表明，许多公司正在采用新技术，而初创公司正在寻找客户。他说：“这一切都是由激励措施驱动的，自我表现的承包商和所有者正在发现提高生产力的好处。”

Lack of investment in new technology also isn’t as massive a roadblock as it sounds, says K.P. Reddy of construction venture capital firm Shadow Ventures. “The lack of R&D spending in construction is a false argument,” he says. “We are a service industry, not a product industry.” For Reddy—whose firm offers early seed funding for construction technology startups with targeted products—the real problem is construction’s skilled labor shortage. “Our industry struggles to attract tech talent to drive innovation. We can be an unsexy business.”

When startups and outside venture capital makes it to construction, they can be thrown by how differently it operates. Entrepreneurs used to traditional business-to-business sales get frustrated pitching owners and contractors afresh on every project. In the banking industry, says Reddy, “you convince their technology guy, and they buy it and deploy it.” But if you pitch a contractor with a great solution, “they say great, talk to a guy on one of our projects. It’s hard having to initially sell project by project to get momentum.”

那么您的客户是谁？

It can be hard finding a customer who has a business case for your product, no matter how useful it is. Airworks is a small image-processing startup that offers a web-based service to convert satellite and UAV imagery into usable 2D and 3D model files. The BIM-ready files are available for download after a couple of hours, with topography and built infrastructure clearly delineated over the aerial images. While it has a product that does a useful tasks faster than normal, Airworks initially found that its customer targets were not interested, because greater efficiency was not their goal.

“When we started this, we tried working with surveyors, since they were adding drones to their toolkit. We thought we would be a good fit,” recalls David Morczinek, CEO of Airworks. “But they’re working on a cost-plus contract, and having extra staffers on site [instead of drones] isn’t a problem. While they don’t want to do work too slowly, there’s no real business-case incentive to speed up.” Airworks quickly realized that the ideal customers were civil engineers who “have bids they want to win—and they’re more likely to win if they have better data up front.” Finding this reliable stream of customers has kept Airworks going. The company is raising its second seed round of funding, at $2.5 million. While Airworks is still developing the machine-learning algorithms that classify all the objects in the aerial imagery and generate the 3D data, it expects the process to be fully automated soon. As its real data set expands, “the results are only going to improve,” says Morczinek.

Six-Year Startup Sees Results

在启动范围的更成熟的一端，Fieldwire学到了一些艰难的课程。目前，Fieldwire目前正在为现场为工人提供文档现场管理应用程序，但其他技术初创公司也来了。“投资者的支票规模肯定正在增加，” Fieldwire创始人兼首席执行官Yves Frinault说。经过多年的建设引起了更广泛的风险投资世界的关注，几位突破性明星引起了更大的投资者的期望。“ 2013年，我们听说一位风险投资人说，由于诅咒的责任，他们不投资建筑技术初创公司，这是建筑业中的每个出色的创业公司都会做得很好，并以不到1亿美元的价格收购，”弗林诺特告诉Enr。新利18备用“但这发生了变化。”他补充说，Aconex，Plangrid和建筑连接在数十亿美元的上方或附近出售。

Despite those major acquisitions, cautionary tales like the recent implosion of the WeWork IPO have cooled off the more wild-eyed predictions. Frinault advises other startups in construction to focus on fundamentals. “Startups need to have solid economics. WeWork was definitely a shot across the bow.”

With Fieldwire, Frinault has gone through a round of seed funding, including investment from Brick & Mortar Ventures, and that long buildup has given it the flexibility to adapt its product to the direct feedback of its users. Working with contractors who self-perform has proven to be a sweet spot. General contractors who subcontract work don’t always see the need for a field-focused project documentation tool, but self-performing Clark Construction knows the pains of maintaining document control. “Our operations-based team did a selection of Fieldwire to allow access to the marked up documents from the field to avoid running back and forth to the job trailer,” says Steve Stankiewicz, Clark director of field applications. “We had a home-built system that did something similar, but this brings some horsepower.”

Getting the documentation right required some back and forth with Fieldwire, but Clark was able to make it work, despite all the data they were throwing at it. “We had to make sure Fieldwire could handle the volume of transactions we incur on design-build [projects],” says Dave Golden, Clark CIO and senior vice president.

关注领域吸引了参加工作ion of more technology-focused subs. Electrical subcontractor Power Design has seen a major acceleration in its technology adoption since it put thousands of iPads in workers’ hands just a few years ago. Recently the company migrated from PlanGrid to Fieldwire for its entire on-site document management. “For us, PlanGrid got really big and was going to a more complete BIM-to-prefab-to-field approach, and they lost some of the focus we liked,” says Brad Moore, VDC technology manager for Power Design. With the staff already trained up to use iPads over the last four years, the transition to Fieldwire was easier than Moore expected. Power Design was able to migrate over 2,100 users working on hundreds of projects totaling $1.4-billion in contract value to Fieldwire without any interruption in project work. With 65% of their users already migrated, Moore expects to have the entire company switched over by the end of the year. He credits the willingness of Fieldwire to assist in the massive training effort that saw 3,500 hours of training in eight weeks.

Moore tries to judge new technologies by actual performance, and says some newer startups are surprised at how technologically sophisticated an electrical subcontractor can be. “One of the first things I do when I evaluate technologies is ask for references,” he says. “Seeing it on a jobsite, where people are using it day-to-day, that makes a big difference.”

许多产品旨在时间表,cost-conscious owners and GCs, Power Design has to look harder for the right startups to partner with, says Raghu Kutty, the company’s CIO. “We’re looking for partners trying to solve the same problems that we are,” he says. But beyond past successes, Kutty says he looks for a few key qualities in any startup. “One requirement is for partners to have open APIs, with a fully documented guide and its team available to talk to our developers,” he says. Open API standards means Power Design’s in-house programmers will be able to more easily move data in and out of the tool, and avoid future bottlenecks.

While major decisions on which tech products and platforms to use on projects often flow downstream from owners and general contractors, Kutty says Power Design has actually been able to push new technologies upstream to its project partners. “We find as long as we are solving a problem that exists in construction, everyone is open to it.”

For Golden and the team at Clark Construction, there are established metrics for any technology startup partnership. “We love working with smaller startup companies that are willing to work on meeting our requirements and needs. They allow us to influence where the product goes,” explains Golden. But it takes time for a company like Clark to evaluate the many startups that come knocking. Golden advises looking past the big promises and asking for proof of performance. Taking the time to evaluate tools can pay off later, as a company can standardize around a product or platform that works. “There are a million technical solutions we could chase,” he says, but the best efficiencies come from adopting a common tool.

What Happens if Construction Cools Off?

While the boom times in construction have helped drive investment, economists are forecasting a dip ahead. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a drop in construction tech investment, says Brick & Mortar’s Rodgers. “It’s possible that less smart investors will pull off, but we’re a very diverse industry,” he says, with market sectors that don’t all move at the same time. And as the mix of work shifts, firms need to stay on top of the changing technology landscape or risk getting left behind, says Power Design’s Kutty. “We expect construction technology to change drastically in the next five to 10 years.”