Autodesk announced this morning that it intends to buy construction software platform BuildingConnected for $275 million (net of the startup’s cash on hand). It comes on the heels of the company’s PlanGrid purchase for $875 million just last month.
With BuildingConnected, the company gets a network of 700,000 construction-related professionals that help real estate companies and construction firms find qualified workers for their projects and manage the bidding process. Much like PlanGrid, which took huge paper plan books and digitized them for construction sites, BuildingConnected is doing that with the planning and management part of the construction process.
Prior to a tool like BuildingConnected, companies managed their construction projects in large and complex Excel spreadsheets. This approach offers a way to simplify project management and improve communication between the different project participants.
Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost sees this addition as another key piece in the company’s growing construction management portfolio. “We are investing in digitizing and automating construction workflows. Autodesk’s goal is to connect construction processes across design, build and operations. BuildingConnected has proven to customers the tremendous value in moving from traditional Rolodexes, whiteboards, emails and spreadsheets to an easy-to-use digital bidding platform,” he said in a statement.
In fact, BuildingConnected joins other products, including Autodesk BIM 360, Revit, AutoCAD, PlanGrid and Assemble Systems.
As with any deal of this sort, BuildingConnected CEO and co-founder Dustin DeVan sees the acquisition as a way to grow faster under the Autodesk corporate umbrella and all of the resources that brings the company. “Together with Autodesk, we can expand the platform’s capabilities and scale globally,” he said in a statement. It likely would have been much harder to do that had they stayed independent.
The deal is expected to close by the end of next month. The company also announced that the PlanGrid acquisition announced last month is now officially closed.
BuildingConnected was founded in 2012 and has raised more than $52 million across four rounds, according to Crunchbase data.
Even as Autodesk tries to corral the construction software business, just last week another construction management startup, Procore, raised $75 billion on a $3 billion valuation, a price that might make it too rich to be an acquisition target.
