Construction Giants' Bet On Tech Startups Paying Off On Their Jobsites

If you walked through the right construction site in the Bay Area five years ago, you had the chance to spy one of the first robots being used to paint interior layouts.

Dusty Robotics, founded in 2018, developed these robots and deployed them across DPR Construction sites, first at Bay Area test sites and then in a handful of metro areas throughout the U.S. Now, they're being used by a host of contractors, sketching out interiors for single-family houses, hospitals and data centers.

This rollout wouldn't have been possible without early investment from DPR Construction’s corporate venture capital arm, WND Ventures. Kaushal Diwan, head of WND, said Dusty Robotics has gone from an investment to an asset in a short amount of time.

"It's the best-performing company in our portfolio, and it's also a company that we use at an enterprise level at DPR," Diwan said. "The key to that is long-term, sustained engagement."

Unlike many traditional venture capital investment firms, construction companies like WND often put the technologies they invest in to the test, supplying these nascent companies with jobsites to assess their products and providing opportunities to scale.

Several major general contractors, including Turner, Webcor and Suffolk Construction, have built venture capital arms or innovation groups to hunt down the next big tech solution that can be used on their jobsites sooner rather than later.

Increased investment in built-tech startups like Dusty Robotics is occurring within a larger wave of growth of corporate venture capital investment. CVC investment, at its most basic level, is when larger companies invest in startups rather than independent venture capital firms.

In 2013, CVC investors overall brought in roughly $7.9B in deal value, according to PitchBook. Last year, deal values grew to almost five times that, reaching $39.5B. CVC investors participated in over 46% of global deal value and 21% of deal count between 2014 and 2024.

Drilling down to the built-tech sector, there were 713 venture deals in construction, building and infrastructure in 2025. That’s a growth of 100 deals from the previous year, according to data compiled by the VC research company BuiltWorlds. Investment grew $3.6B year-over-year to $18.6B in that time.

CVCs only made up 22% of the venture capital activity in 2025, down from 23.7% the year prior, according to PitchBook. However, these companies made up roughly 67% of the deal value, meaning they are putting more money into larger deals. 

"For CVCs, specifically, the last several years have been more active because they've actually had more defined strategies," said Max Quertermus, senior analyst at BuiltWorlds. "It's a lot more intentional from these corporates.”

Construction industry headwinds have exacerbated the need for investment in innovative solutions.

Development demand for data centers has created a backlog for large-scale construction, and immigration enforcement has put a strain on the labor market. The industry will need to hire 349,000 workers to meet demand in 2026 and another 456,000 in 2027, according to a January Associated Builders and Contractors report.

Venture capital firms have historically been motivated by returns on investment and financial certainty. CVCs have historically played a different role, using their deep first-person knowledge to invest in companies with more immediate goals in mind.

"I'm the domain expert on this product," Diwan said. "I know the pitfalls of why this will and will not work, and I'll do everything I can to invest in something that I know I will use."

Both types of investment have their place in the startup ecosystem, as new companies need both the raw capital to keep going and the strategic development to scale and build off of initial findings and solutions.

"The best structure of a cap table is to have both VCs and CVCs because they obviously offer and have different incentives," Quertermus said.

Suffolk has doubled down on its investments in emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, as a way to address its rapid growth and future plans.

"We've been growing really fast and foresee ourselves growing really fast, and we need all of these tools so that we can build at the speed that the market is demanding," Suffolk Construction Chief Technology Officer Jit Kee Chin said. "Necessity is the mother of invention, they say."

The firm's VC arm was founded in 2019. In 2020, it announced its Boost program, which acts as a networking and acceleration environment for startups. The program provides startups with jobsite piloting opportunities and guidance for product development. The company is now on its fifth iteration of the program.

Suffolk Technologies also closed on its inaugural venture capital fund in 2023. The Suffolk Technologies Fund I garnered $110M in commitments targeting early- to growth-stage companies across the construction and property technology sectors.

Since the fund closed its funding round, the firm has expanded its portfolio to over 50 companies in 2025 from the 30 it had two years prior.

The rise in artificial intelligence has also completely changed the industry. Over the last several quarters, more than 50% of the deals tracked by BuiltWorlds involved some type of AI implementation.

"It's almost like a prerequisite for startups," Quertermus said.

WND Ventures has been active in the sector since 2017. Since its founding, it has invested in more than 14 startups and backed two funds as a limited partner.

The company has shifted its focus in the past year toward solutions that automate work and improve costs at the worksite as AI and robotics have become more of a focal point in building technology.

Chin pointed to several AI portfolio companies, including Augmenta, Higharc and Trunk Tools, which have all been important in their worksites. In March, Suffolk signed an AI enterprise agreement with Trunk Tools to deploy its AI agent to more than 1,500 field users.

For general contractors looking to invest in these companies, the vetting process has changed quite a bit. Diwan said his firm is more likely to bring in its AI Machine Learning Team on deals to ensure the architecture can withstand the test of time and the company isn't just attacking surface-level problems.

"Unless you dig in deep and understand what the architecture and the structure of how the software is developed, you might be investing in something that's a wrapper platform," Diwan said.

The adoption of the tech within the company happens through its innovation group as it seeks to answer questions over multiple jobsites. 

"We want to make sure that we repeat that same sort of experience on another jobsite," Diwan said. "I don't want to invest in something that we try, and it works great on one project, but then I can't repeat that same success on another project."