Eniac continues to dig construction tech
Why we led our latest round with BRIQ
By Tim Young & nihal mehta, Founding General Partners, Eniac
At Eniac, we see the eventual shift of construction companies to data-driven decision making an enormous opportunity. Over the last five years, we have been closely tracking construction saas and placing bets in the space. With the recent news of Procore valued at nearly $3b, Katerra raising $865m from Softbank, and Autodesk’s back-to-back acquisitions of PlanGrid ($875m) and BuildingConnected ($275m), we are starting to see this vertical heat up.
Globally, construction output is forecasted to reach upwards of $12.7 trillion by 2022, and the average spend on IT for construction companies is extremely low, relatively. Gartner reports that construction ranks last for IT spend, averaging just over 1% on IT, compared to the overall average of about 3.2% in other industries. And with 81% of decision-makers across the construction industry planning to spend more on technology in 2019, this momentum is only going to continue.
Today, we are excited to announce our latest construction SaaS investment in BRIQ, a Santa Barbara-based company that is bringing data intelligence and machine learning to allow builders to make better strategic decisions. We led their $3m seed round, along with our friends at MetaProp NYC and mState.
BRIQ ingests, manages and interprets construction data. These datasets are often in disparate software, devices, and files, making construction project management and strategic decision making processes difficult. BRIQ normalizes these data sets together in a unified view, improving productivity and reducing risks with project delivery. BRIQ provides strategic insights such as which projects are more likely to be successful, where demand for new projects is highest, and how to better connect and automate workflows and data silos. (Read more in TechCrunch.)
Not only is BRIQ carving an entirely new path for data intelligence across the industry, but we were impressed by the founding team’s passion and pedigree in the industry.
The company is led by two longtime friends with prolific success stories. Ron Goldshmidt comes as an experienced leader from Wall Street where he built quantitative-based trading businesses for dozens of global emerging markets, and Bassem Hamdy has forged the path for today’s construction software landscape. Hamdy brings an unparalleled domain experience — with more than 19 years working across various key stakeholder roles in construction at Procore and CMiC — and coming from an immigrant family, he personifies the values Eniac looks for in founders — knowledge, passion and unrelenting grit to be a changemaker.
“Bassem built and helped run the most successful construction software businesses in the world. It is rare and humbling to have an opportunity to help build a company from the ground up with an industry legend. The technology Bassem and his team are building will do something the industry has never seen before: break down data silos to leverage information in real time. Bassem has built and run the most successful construction software businesses in the world, and his knowledge of the construction space s second to none.”
We continue our quest for the next big idea that will be transformative to the construction industry. If you are an entrepreneur or an investor active across this vertical, please reach us at team@eniac.vc
