Procore is acquiring lien management and construction payments technology company Levelset for $500 million. The acquisition includes roughly $425 million in cash and $75 million in Procore common stock,originally issued in May。该交易预计在第四砂岩ter.

The deal would be Procore's largest acquisition ever, one that CEO Tooey Courtemanche says will become an important part of the construction management technology company's platform. Acquiring Levelset will add lien rights management to Procore's platform after the deal closes later this year.

"The number one problem that we wanted to solve in 2022 was lien rights management," Courtemanche says. "It's a priority for Procore to finish these complex workflows for our customers. So, definitely we are going to be looking at what the most expeditious route is here, but we also have to remember, we're serving the small-to-medium business, the mid-market in the enterprise, we're serving owners, general contractors and specialty contractors."

Tackling Payment Problems

Management consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a report that it takes an average of 83 days for payment to reach contractors after invoicing. Courtemanche says that ever since Procore began adding financials to its platform in 2017, he knew the many stakeholders and processes involved in construction would pose a challenge for creating effective products for contractors.

Courtemanche says the workflows involved were long and complicated because they crossed so many different stakeholders from bidding to estimating to change orders and that contracting instruments such as G702 and G703 documents for invoicing and scheduling already had established processes built around them. Compliance is also intertwined with bidding and payments, he adds.

LevelSethas been working on the many problems that plague payments in construction since 2012 when it was founded in New Orleans by CEO Scott Wolfe. A particular pain point that Levelset sought to address with anovel approach曾经是一个review platform对于提供公司资料的分包商，将总承包商和所有者评为缓慢，中等或快速付款人。

"This is a really complicated, manual area that contractors, vendors, suppliers, general contractors, owners—they all struggle with it. We've been beating that drum for years and succeeding at modernizing it for thousands of companies," Wolfe says.

沃尔夫（Wolfe）和法院（Courtemanche）都表示，将采用新的方法和流程来解决现代化的建筑付款。Courtemanche表示，LevelSet将与拥有独立公司的公司运作，直到可以在2022年建立Procore平台的更多开发和集成到Procore的平台中。

"If you think about Procore's mission of connecting all the stakeholders on a global platform, one of the things that's interesting about lien rights is they actually do connect the stakeholders, it connects them in risk," Wolfe says. "We've had to build our platform from the beginning, thinking about how do we connect all the different stakeholders, because the only way to modernize lien rights in our view is to get all the stakeholders to be connected and exchange this information on a modern platform."

Courtemanche says the acquisition will also give Procore access to industry data, including payments and compliance activity, allowing it to deliver risk intelligence to our customers, and to develop more financial products. He also says that combining Procore and Levelset's customer data will allow the combined company to provide analysis of individual user performance and industrywide risk trends.

数据告诉您什么

"Data really does help you assess risk because you can actually get down to to the lowest detail to understand where risk really occurs and where it doesn't," Courtemanche says. "I think we just have a better view of risk than most folks out there."

He says that Procore's data graph, already used by the Associated General Contractors of America and other organizations to跟踪构建趋势，以及及其风险和付款信息的LevelSet数据图将使人工智能和机器学习算法可以预测趋势和成果的强大组合。

"There's nothing more exciting for machine learning engineers and data scientists to look at," Courtemanche says. "I just had the opportunity to meet with Levelset's teams and they also have a very, very strong data team on their side."

打破新的地面

It's a busy time for Procore, as the company will again be holding its开创会议10月12日至14日。Courtemanche兼产品高级副总裁Wyatt Jenkins表示，该公司的IPO允许其投资于其平台的收购和增强功能。在虚拟会议之前，已经宣布了一些新的Procore平台增强功能，例如具有集成标记和特定施工工作流的新的协作文档管理工具。Procore还通过11个新数据中心扩展了基础架构。现在，总共有15个数据中心允许客户在Procore网络中本地存储项目数据。

"Our workflow engine works on any tool in Procore, whether it's documents or files or invoices, wherever you go in Procore, whatever tool you're using, you can just dip down into the workflow engine, click onto it and a little sidebar comes up and it shows a diagram of a workflow," Jenkins says. "If you want it to go to this person or this person to approve things, you can, and now you've created a workflow."

Jenkins adds that the company's biggest competitor is still spreadsheets and ink-on-paper and he, Courtemanche and Wolfe all say the challenge of digitizing construction workflows is still a challenge the construction platform provider is committed to solving.