M&A SmartCraft Buys LiveCosts for €8.45M, and the Multiple Is Worth Writing Down A profitable Irish cost-control platform with €1.77M of ARR sold for under five times revenue — a number worth holding next to what AI-branded construction startups are raising at. Hugo Pegley · Sep 8, 2026
Funding SoftBank Just Wrote a $200M Series A Into a Company That Bolts Brains Onto Excavators You Already Own Gravis Robotics raised the largest Series A construction robotics has seen, from a single investor, at a reported $1 billion valuation — nine months after a $23 million round. The retrofit thesis just got the most expensive endorsement it has ever received. Hugo Pegley · Aug 24, 2026
Funding Exclaim Robotics Raised $4.95M for the Job Nobody Wants: Reaching Into a Live 800-Volt Rack A Zurich startup founded by a former NVIDIA and Google roboticist has come out of stealth to build machines that service AI data centres. The wedge is not labour cost — it is that the electrical architecture of these buildings is turning routine maintenance into hazardous work. Hugo Pegley · Aug 16, 2026
Funding Arrakis Raised $38M on a Bet Against Desk Work. Construction Is on the Target List. Seven months after being founded, the London and Paris startup came out of stealth with a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital. Its pitch is that AI's real return is in industrial operations, not offices — and its own site lists engineering and construction as a target sector. Its disclosed customers are not there yet. Hugo Pegley · Aug 3, 2026
Analysis Europe Just Opened Bidding on Seven AI Gigafactories. Someone Has to Build Them. The European Commission launched its AI Gigafactories call on 30 July, aiming to mobilise more than €30 billion for up to seven AI compute campuses. Proposals close 12 November, selection lands in early 2027, and the winners are expected to be operating within 18 months of that — a construction timeline worth reading closely. Hugo Pegley · Aug 3, 2026
Funding All3 Raises $25M to Build Construction's Whole Stack at Once — Robots, AI Design, and the Factory Europe's largest construction-robotics seed of the year backs a company that refuses to pick a layer. All3 is building autonomous on-site robots, AI design software, and robotic component factories as a single integrated system — a vertically integrated bet that prefab's old rigidity can finally be engineered away. Hugo Pegley · Jun 18, 2026
Funding Sitegeist Raises €4M to Aim Robots at Europe's Crumbling Concrete A Technical University of Munich spin-off has raised pre-seed funding for AI-enabled robots that repair concrete on active infrastructure sites — no 3D model required. It is a bet that the next robotics market in construction is not new buildings, but the hundreds of billions of euros of decay already on the ground. Hugo Pegley · Jun 18, 2026
