Dive Brief:
- Contech giant Procore has entered an agreement to acquire DroneDeploy, a prominent robotics and visual intelligence platform that’s used in over 180 countries, according to a Wednesday announcement. Procore will acquire the firm for $845 million in cash, subject to customary purchase price adjustments.
- When the acquisition closes later this year, Procore and DroneDeploy will sell one another’s solutions to their client base, Ajei Gopal, president and CEO of Procore, said in the announcement.
- The combination will create a veritable ocean of construction data. By pairing the two tech companies’ capabilities, builders will be able to use cameras, drones and robots to regularly evaluate jobsites and automatically initiate appropriate responses securely, compliantly and in context, per the announcement.
Dive Insight:
The deal underscores the power of data control in a landscape dominated by artificial intelligence. Simply put, data is king.
Procore’s dataset includes nearly 400 million photos, more than 126 million drawings and over 10 million requests for information, submittals and inspections recorded on its platform in the last year alone, according to the firm.
Meanwhile, DroneDeploy offers its visual record of physical builds, which spans approximately 20 trillion square feet of visual data for the built world, tens of millions of user-generated annotations and more than 100,000 labeled safety issues, per the announcement.
“For the longer term, adding DroneDeploy’s technology into the Procore platform will enable us to accelerate our AI strategy and deliver digital coworkers that track what's happening on a project, make sense of it, and then take action to change the outcome,” Gopal said in the announcement.
DroneDeploy is not alone as a Procore acquisition target. In January, it acquired Datagrid, a vertical AI firm that offers builders a host of AI agents. At the time, Procore flagged the acquisition as part of its strategy to bolster its AI strategy and capabilities. That maps out to the company’s current stance, said Meg Baldini, vice president of corporate development & partnerships at Procore.
“We’ve always viewed acquisitions as a way to accelerate our strategy—they’re never the strategy itself,” Baldini told Construction Dive via email. “M&A is simply one tool we use to move faster, and both Datagrid and DroneDeploy are examples of acquisitions that strengthen our platform and accelerate our AI strategy.”
Indeed, M&A as a tactic has gained momentum over the past year both among contech firms and construction companies alike. Other recent acquisitions in the contech space include Autodesk’s absorbing Rhumbix, which it finalized in March. Shortly after, Trimble signed a deal to acquire Document Crunch.
