Artificial intelligence-powered construction management startup Buildots Ltd. said today it has raised $130 million in new late-stage funding to expand its platform and capitalize on rising investment in data centers, manufacturing plants and energy infrastructure.
The financing brings its total capital raised to $297 million. It comes about 16 months after the startup closed a $45 million Series D round led by Qumra Capital Management Ltd. Buildots then served about 50 construction companies, compared with more than 100 large firms today.
The Tel Aviv-based firm’s platform uses computer vision to convert video captured on construction sites into a continuously updated digital representation of each project. Its AI models compare that imagery to construction schedules and three-dimensional building models to classify completed work, spot deviations and forecast potential delays.
The company says the technology gives project managers an objective and efficient alternative to manual inspections, spreadsheets and fragmented progress reports. Customers can examine specific areas of a building, track the status of individual tasks and monitor whether work is advancing quickly enough to meet deadlines.
Demand is being driven in part by the rapid construction of artificial intelligence data centers, where delays can postpone the availability of costly computing infrastructure. Buildots also targets advanced manufacturing plants, energy projects, hospitals, schools, commercial buildings and residential developments.
Buildots said large, multiyear agreements covering entire construction portfolios are becoming more common as customers move beyond deploying the platform on individual projects.
The company plans to use the new capital to expand across North America and Europe, extend its software to more stages of construction, from bidding through handover, and provide executives with consolidated intelligence covering multiple projects. It said has recorded threefold annual revenue growth for several years, though it didn’t disclose specifics or its valuation.
Buildots is also broadening the types of data its platform analyzes. It recently acquired construction workforce and safety management provider Genda Inc. to combine labor activity with progress data. The company said connecting the two data types can help contractors identify why work is falling behind and determine whether corrective actions are effective.
It says its competitive advantage comes from eight years of data gathered on actual construction sites rather than information scraped from the internet or used to train general-purpose AI models.
“The winners build the foundational technology layer that everyone else ends up depending on,” said Ziv Kop, managing partner at O.G. Venture Partners. “Buildots is that layer for construction, trained on a volume and quality of site data that nobody else has.”
O.G. Venture Partners LP led the round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Intel Capital Corp., Mohari Ventures, Human Capital Investment Management LLC, Qumra Capital, Viola Group Inc.’s Viola Growth fund, Poalim Equity Ltd. and individual investor Avigdor Willenz.
