Autonomous Retrofits, AI Permits Drive $208M Contech Funding Boom

Investment in construction technology is surging as the industry leans deeper into artificial intelligence and robotics to tackle labor gaps, inefficiencies and project delays. In the second quarter of 2025 alone, six contech startups attracted a combined $208 million from investors betting big on AI-driven solutions that promise to transform traditional job sites.

Bedrock Robotics, a new San Francisco-based player founded by former Waymo engineers, made a splash by emerging from stealth mode with $80 million in Seed and Series A funding, announced July 16. The company focuses on retrofitting customers’ heavy machinery with “reversible, same-day hardware and software installs” to deliver fully autonomous operations. By integrating AI-driven autonomy into existing fleets, Bedrock claims it can help builders run equipment “around the clock, accelerate project schedules, increase profitability and safety and track job progress,” according to its release. The startup plans to scale its workforce and partnerships to hit a target for the first operator-less deployments in 2026.

AIM Intelligent Machines, based in Redmond, Washington, secured $50 million to push what it calls “the world’s first embodied artificial intelligence platform for earthmoving machinery.” Unlike brand-new machines, AIM’s technology retrofits bulldozers and excavators of any make or model, turning aging fleets into smart, semi-autonomous assets. “With it, the AI platform enables a wide range of applications, from mining essential materials to building planetary-scale infrastructure,” the company said.

AI is also making back-office tasks more efficient. Buildots, a Tel Aviv-based firm, landed $45 million in fresh capital to grow its predictive analytics and computer vision tools for construction teams. Its software promises to help builders cut costly delays “by up to 50%,” while expanding to cover more phases of the construction cycle and using historical data to “benchmark and optimize future project performance.” The company said the new funding will help quadruple its North American presence this year.

Meanwhile, Parspec, headquartered in San Mateo, California, raised $20 million in Series A funds for its AI-native bidding platform, which automatically matches specs to compliant products and extracts requirements from complex design files. The firm said its customers “consistently report 50-100% improvement in labor productivity and improved bid quality and compliance.” Parspec aims to build an end-to-end solution for the entire project order lifecycle and launch a portal for buyers to access project documents and real-time updates.

Smaller startups also joined the quarter’s contech funding surge. Klutch AI, out of Seattle, brought in $8 million in Seed funding to push its field-tested AI agents that automate tasks beyond simple AI chat tools. Its software coordinates “permit review, takeoffs and estimates, jobsite documentation and vendor coordination,” while also flagging issues and surfacing insights from photos, emails, texts and calls. The fresh capital will go toward expanding workflow automations and deeper integrations with the industry’s go-to tools.

Finally, Lafayette, California-based Shovels closed a $5 million Seed round to advance its AI-powered permit scraping tech. Its tools already cover about 85% of the U.S. population with “real-time processing of new permits” and “continuous validation and cleansing of data streams.” Shovels plans to expand to the remaining jurisdictions and shrink update times to 48 hours or less, with the goal of delivering “real-time data across all 20,000+ jurisdictions nationwide.”

Together, these six firms reflect how construction tech continues to attract robust venture capital, with investors banking on AI to solve some of the industry’s oldest headaches — from labor shortages to administrative bottlenecks. As Bedrock’s founders and others push toward fully autonomous fleets and smarter workflows, the next generation of job sites could look radically different in just a few years.

Originally reported by Matthew Thibault in Construction Dive.