Dive Brief:
- Trimble, the Westminster, Colorado-based contech stalwart, has acquired payments and compliance startup Flashtract as it looks to gain ground in the electronic management of those tasks for contractors, the company announced in a May 8 news release. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- Flashtract technology is used to manage payment applications, lien waivers and other compliance and billing documentation electronically, per the release, which eliminates back-and-forth communication and cumbersome document transfers. Trimble has rebranded the tech as Trimble Pay.
- The bolt-on solution will initially integrate with Trimble Viewpoint Vista, the company’s enterprise resource planning solution for construction, per the release. Trimble will demo the tech at the Construction Financial Management Association national conference later this month, and join the Trimble Construction One software suite later this year.
Dive Insight:
Lawrence Smith, Trimble’s vice president of construction management solutions, said in an interview with Construction Dive that the ball for this deal got rolling 18 months ago, after the firm acquired platform-as-a-service Ryvit in January 2023, which builds connections between commonly used applications and data sources.
Smith told Construction Dive that Flashtract would slot in well with the company’s proprietary system, Viewpoint ePayments, which allows builders to manage their accounts payable more efficiently. He mentioned that the goal was to find something that eliminates as many manual processes as possible via a broader business push toward digitization.
“Flashtract landed in that sweet spot for us where we felt it was really complementary to the solutions that we already have,” Smith said.
Smith declined to comment on the company’s future M&A plans, citing its status as a publicly traded company, but said that it was always looking for more firms to add to its portfolio that work with contractors and address pain points.
“You can see from our history that we have been quite an acquisitive company. We've acquired a lot of companies in the space,” Smith said.
This is the third company in the past year and change — along with Rivyt, Trimble completed its acquisition of cloud-based transportation management platform Transporeon in April 2023.
Recent acquisitions by tech stalwarts have played out against the backdrop of an emerging adoption ceiling in the contech industry, where larger firms have run into growth challenges after establishing a broader market. When that happens, larger companies can buy smaller ones to leverage the stronger growth seen in startups’ customer bases.
Smith, however, doesn’t believe that that ceiling exists, and instead thinks that there are deeper places to go for Trimble. He sees the construction industry as divided into two groups — larger contractors, that may have chief information officers and are moving along into tech, and smaller builders that are struggling with adoption.
“I see lots of opportunity for contractors that have really got challenges to adopt technology in a way that brings the maximum value to their organization,” Smith said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the name of the company acquired by Trimble. It is Flashtract.
