BRICKS & BYTES BULLETIN
INTELLIGENCE FOR CONSTRUCTION LEADERS

THIS WEEK
Polestar To Construction, Inside Europe’s Top Contractors + Big VC Update

An ex-Polestar designer walks into construction and finds an industry decades behind. A leading ConTech investor explains exactly why and where the money should have gone. Chetan Kotur left automotive and found an industry still carrying rebar by hand. Patric Hellermann has the data on why a decade of investment didn’t fix it.

THE EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS

Full episode write-up at the bottom↓

Key Takeaway 1:

Europe’s leading contractors are building dedicated failure labs. Laing O’Rourke, Bouygues, and Vinci are all running the same play. If you have nowhere to trial a machine safely, you are already behind the firms writing the hardware era’s rules.

Key Takeaway 2:

Construction’s last decade of tech spend hit the wrong 2%. People, materials, and machines are 98% of the cost base. Patric Hellermann at Foundamental puts it plainly: one HR process running 10% more efficiently doesn’t show up in the P&L.

Key Takeaway 3:

Safety incidents consume 4 to 6% of total project value. Most contractors run at a 2 to 3% margin. The average project loses more to incidents than it earns. Safety is the biggest margin lever most firms aren’t managing.

7 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION
ON THE RADAR THIS WEEK

• Bricks & Bytes LIVE at Paris Global Summit x Demo Day, June 10, 1:00-4:00 PM – We’ll host live from the BuiltWorlds Paris Summit. Watch the Demo Day sessions in real time. (More) 

• London Tech Week runs June 8-12 at Olympia – Europe’s flagship tech festival, strong AI and enterprise transformation reading for AEC innovation leaders. (More)

• ICCSTE 2026 opens Thursday in Barcelona – Civil, structural, and transportation engineering research across 11th annual global gathering. (More)

• AIA26 opens Wednesday in San Diego – 10,000+ AEC professionals, industry’s largest expo, AI and embodied carbon sessions. (More)

• SuperAI 2026 opens Wednesday in Singapore – Asia’s largest AI conference, 10,000+ attendees, dedicated Robotics and Embodied AI track covering automation in construction and the built environment. (More)

• AGC Federal Contractors Conference, Washington D.C., June 8-10 – FAR overhaul, tariffs, and cost escalations on the agenda. (More)

• Bricks & Bytes State of Construction Safety Tech report launches this week – Safety incidents consume 4 to 6% of total project value against a 2 to 3% margin. The market, the buyers, and where AI actually works on site. (More)

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FULL EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
Polestar To Construction, Inside Europe’s Top Contractors + Big VC Update

Chetan Kotur spent a decade designing and launching cars. First at Volvo, then at Polestar, where he built the electric vehicle brand from 100 people to 4,000, across 29 markets. Then Ray O’Rourke called him with a pitch so blunt it was almost a dare: you’ve disrupted one industry; come and disrupt mine.

Three and a half years later, Chetan sat in a room full of senior construction executives at our private fireside in London and told them what he found when he arrived. Some of it is genuinely encouraging. Some of it should embarrass us all.

In the same week, in Paris, I was on stage with Patric Hellermann from Foundamental, one of the most followed investors in construction tech, and his argument explains, from the money side, exactly why what Chetan described is still happening.

The outsider who found the bodies

What sold Chetan on the role was Ray O’Rourke himself. Ray started his working life underground on the Victoria Line, shoveling dirt and pushing carts, before building a 15,000-person business. When he says the goal is to eliminate manual strain from construction, it lands differently than when most executives say it. 

Chetan’s diagnosis of the industry, shared at the fireside, has three parts.

Nobody watches the competition. In automotive, there’s a whole department dedicated to buying competitor cars, ripping them apart, scanning every component, and loading the models into your own systems. When Chetan arrived in construction and asked teams working on a new idea who else was doing this, the room went silent. Not because the answer was secret. Because nobody had checked.

Procurement means squeezing, not investing. In automotive, supply chain management means deep analysis of every tier of suppliers and actual investment in the ones upstream. In construction, Chetan says, we call it “supply chain management,” and mostly it means squeezing the next company down the chain. And when everyone squeezes everyone, the pressure has to land somewhere.

It lands on people. Fifty-six percent of all construction injuries are musculoskeletal: damaged backs, knees, shoulders, and joints from years of lifting and carrying. Automotive moved past that decades ago. Male construction workers are three times more likely to die by suicide than those working in other industries, according to the CIOB’s 2025 mental health report. Roughly two percent of the youngest generations have any interest in joining us. Chetan’s team put strain gauges on steel fixers and tracked a normal working day. Some spend their weekends in physical recovery just to walk back on site at four o’clock Monday morning to pick up more rebar.

Image: CIOB

So what is Laing O’Rourke actually doing about it? Their 70-60-30 philosophy: 70% of work is done offsite, 60% fewer hours on site, and 30% faster delivery. What the fireside added was the story of how that philosophy actually gets built and why Chetan insisted on doing it differently from day one.

He told Ray early on that the way construction innovates (throwing half-finished ideas onto live sites as social experiments) is like giving the keys of a prototype car to a customer and asking them to smash it into a wall. They might survive. But they’re never getting in that car again.

So Chetan demanded a lab. Half his team now works inside it, testing, prototyping, and breaking things, including collaborative robots you can train by physically guiding the arm through the task with no programmer required.

The proof point is Hinkley Point C, the 3.2 gigawatt nuclear power station that is the largest infrastructure project in the UK. When COVID knocked the program sideways, Ray O’Rourke walked the site and saw seven men carrying a single piece of rebar: 140 kilograms, by hand, one bar at a time, on a project with 275,000 tonnes of the stuff.

His response: In 50 years, nothing had changed. The team’s answer was a precision assembly factory that builds entire reinforcement cages weighing up to 28 tons and delivers them to the site in one piece. The published numbers are a 75% improvement in on-site productivity and a 55% improvement on schedule. Nobody carries the bar. The bar arrives assembled.

The pattern showing up across Europe

Chetan is not alone. Two examples from the same week make the point.

Bouygues Construction built Scale One, a full mock construction site thirty minutes outside Paris where any startup, manufacturer, or competitor can trial technology at cost, open book, no margin. Their head of R&D partnerships explains the logic: you call a site manager with a new idea, he gives you a corner of his site the first time, then your half-ready innovation starts threatening his quality, his margin, and his program. The second time you call, he doesn’t pick up. Scale One is a site with no site manager to protect. The grand opening is this September.

Scale One is located in Chilly-Mazarin, near Paris. Image: Bouygues

Vinci ran the same play before deploying Gravis, the autonomous excavator, hiring a field for a week, and letting the machine learn in private before it went near a live job. Phil Read’s observation from the trials: the value you get is very rarely the value you expected.

• They brought in Gravis to remove the operator. What showed up was millimeter accuracy and a 22% productivity improvement.

• They brought in a plasterboard cutting robot for waste reduction. What the managing director noticed was that no dust meant no dust masks, which meant supervisors freed from enforcing them.

While they arrived almost unnoticed, everybody felt them.

Hardware doesn’t fail quietly: it fails dangerously and expensively, and no site manager on a live program can absorb that risk. The contractors with somewhere to fail safely will adopt the machines first, and the gap will compound. A lab is becoming what a BIM team was fifteen years ago: the thing the serious players quietly built before everyone else realized it was table stakes.

The investor who says you’ve been solving the wrong problem

Patric’s argument, which we went deeper into earlier this week, starts with a simple chart. In construction, 35 to 40% of revenue goes on people, another 35 to 40% on materials, and around 10% on machines. Software accounts for about 2%. A decade of construction tech has been aimed at that 2% sliver.

Meanwhile, since 2020, material prices in the US have doubled across the board: cement up 2.5 times, steel doubled, machinery up 40%, and the Deloitte 2026 E&C Outlook confirms the downstream effect: tightened margins and stretched schedules, with labor and materials now the dominant cost pressures on both sides of the Atlantic.

His second point cuts deeper. Everyone says construction’s problem is that nothing is standardized. Patric says construction is already standardized, just at the lowest possible level, at the level of the individual component: the brick, the rebar, the nail, the digger.

The failures of the last decade came from companies trying to standardize at the top: turning the whole building into a product and hoping the market would want it. That was modular construction’s bet. That was Katerra’s bet, with $3 billion behind it.

The company he holds up as the one that got it right is Jan Hendrik Goldbeck, whose family business went from €750M to €7B by treating buildings like configurable products. Goldbeck didn’t invent a new product and hope for demand. They took things the market already buys in huge volumes (first parking garages, then warehouses, then office buildings) and standardized them so radically they became products. Demand first, then the factory.

Where does he think the next construction tech unicorn comes from? He points to robotics, though not in the way most people expect. He doesn’t think construction needs a uniform supply of robots. It needs a uniform supply of integration. In manufacturing, nobody automates a factory by buying robots off a website. They hire a systems integrator: a firm that designs the setup, sources the machines, programs them, installs them, and makes them work in your specific environment. That profession has existed for 35 years. Construction barely has it.

What Chetan and Patric would ask you

Both conversations end in the same place: a question about your own business.

Chetan’s is the simpler one. When your team is working on a new idea, does anyone check who else is doing it? And if you were offered a free two-week robotics trial starting Monday, where would you put it? If neither question has a fast answer, that’s the diagnostic.

Patric’s is harder. What’s the standardized, repeating unit of demand in your business (the thing you build over and over that could become a product)? And when you evaluate a technology vendor, can they ride the elevator from their grand vision all the way down to the exact screw they solve for you tomorrow? He’s found that the weak ones, when you push past the fourth or fifth detailed question, retreat back. That retreat tells you everything.

The State of Construction Safety Tech report lands this week. The number on the cover (4 to 6% of project cost against a 2 to 3% margin) belongs in every budget conversation you have this month.