Analysis Arcadis Ran 150 Engineers Through an AI Platform for Six Months, Then Wrote a Cheque A €4.87 billion engineering firm has taken a stake in Nomic, the company behind GPT4All, after a trial across 12 countries. The interesting part is not the investment — it is that the trial came first, and the numbers were published. Hugo Pegley · Aug 16, 2026
Funding Why Is One of AI's Founding Figures Backing a $10M Bet on Construction Drawings? Yann LeCun, one of the researchers who built modern deep learning, is among the individual backers of Primepoint's $10 million seed. The San Mateo startup is chasing a problem text-based AI keeps failing at: actually reading a construction drawing set. Hugo Pegley · Jul 20, 2026
Funding The Company That Certified Carbon Removal Is Coming for Construction's Materials Problem Isometric raised $40M to expand its agentic AI certification platform beyond carbon markets into industrial verification — including the steel and cement the built environment runs on. John Doerr backed it. AXA led it. The question is whether construction is the next big market, or a footnote. Hugo Pegley · Jun 30, 2026
Funding Endra Raises $50M Series A — a16z Bets on the Most Rule-Bound Corner of Building Design Andreessen Horowitz leads a $50M round into Endra, an AI that automates MEP engineering — the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work that every building requires and that has resisted software automation for decades. The customer list suggests this is not a demo. Hugo Pegley · Jun 29, 2026
Analysis McCarthy Is Building an Operating System for Construction. Palantir Is Helping. The defense-and-intelligence AI company is now embedded inside one of America's largest general contractors, co-building a platform called Pulse. The question is whether construction has ever actually needed what Palantir is selling. Hugo Pegley · Jun 29, 2026
Funding DPR and Suffolk Technologies Invest in Skillit, Arguing Construction's Labor Problem Is Really a Data Problem Two of the most technology-focused general contractors in the country have made undisclosed equity investments in Skillit, an AI hiring platform with 190,000 vetted craft workers across 45 trades. Their thesis: the industry doesn't have a worker shortage — it has a broken market for finding the workers it already has. Hugo Pegley · Jun 25, 2026
Funding Sensera Systems Raises $27M to Turn Solar-Powered Site Cameras Into AI Eyes The Colorado company already has the hardware on thousands of job sites: self-contained, solar-powered, wirelessly connected cameras. The Series B is a bet that the durable value is in the software layer — turning all that video into real-time AI insight rather than footage nobody watches. Hugo Pegley · Jun 18, 2026
