Procore Technologies Inc – Jul 20, 2023

As companies worldwide face an escalating push for more productivity, efficiency, and safety, digitization has emerged as an indispensable solution, even for the construction industry, one of the world’s oldest trades. Despite its deep roots and longstanding traditions, the sector is also embracing its own digital transformation.

On a mission to connect everyone in construction to a global platform, Procore Technologies has become a leading provider of cloud-based construction management software. The company focuses exclusively on connecting the industry’s key stakeholders and making it possible for them to collaborate and access services from any location on any internet-connected device. Using open application programming interfaces and an application marketplace, Procore also allows customers to integrate products with their internal systems.

As a result, the software provider is modernizing construction management by enabling real-time access to critical project information, simplifying complex workflows, and facilitating seamless communication. The platform addresses a range of evolving needs throughout an entire project’s lifecycle, including bidding, scheduling, labor tracking, financial management, and more. It also facilitates compliance with safety and other regulatory standards, reducing rework and costly delays, ultimately helping to increase productivity and efficiency and enhancing financial transparency and accountability.

With the construction industry still in the early stages of digitization, Procore has positioned itself to leverage its comprehensive products and industry presence to establish the platform as the industry standard in construction, both domestically and internationally.

Founded in 2002 by current CEO Craig “Tooey” Courtemanche, Procore was born out of frustration with the inefficiencies and communication challenges in the construction industry. Tooey, who was a builder by trade, sought to build user-friendly software that made project management easier for construction professionals.

Initially, Procore was a downloadable Windows application aimed at helping small to medium-sized construction businesses manage their projects more efficiently. After tackling usability issues and fine-tuning its product to ensure a seamless user experience, Procore became a cloud-based software in 2006. This was a pioneering move that leveraged the emerging cloud technology to offer more flexibility, accessibility, and efficiency. The shift to cloud-based software allowed real-time access and collaboration, propelling user numbers significantly.

The company continued to grow its product range in response to the changing needs of the construction industry. Starting with its Project Management product, it gradually introduced more features and capabilities, expanding into Quality & Safety, Financials, and Field Productivity categories. Each product addition has further cemented Procore’s status as a comprehensive construction management platform, enhancing its appeal to a wider customer base.

Over the years, Procore also developed integrations with other leading enterprise software providers, such as Sage, Quickbooks, and AutoDesk, to provide a more robust and interconnected ecosystem for its users. Additionally, the establishment of Procore’s App Marketplace allowed it to offer extended functionalities to its users through partner solutions.

Procore’s international growth commenced as it began to attract customers from around the globe. In 2015, the company opened its first international office in Sydney, followed by other locations across Canada and the UK. While in 2020, Procore went public with an IPO that raised over $600 million.

Founder Craig Courtemanche Jr continues to serve Procore as the company’s CEO, president, and chairman of the board. Courtemanche’s entire career has been in the construction industry. Under his leadership, Procore has grown from humble beginnings to a leading provider of construction management software, connecting millions of users across more than 150 countries. He has also ensured the platform has continually evolved to meet the changing needs of the industry.

Joining Courtemanche is Steve Davis, as the company’s president of product and technology leading its design and engineering organizations. Davis is a seasoned technology leader with vast experience across several global, high-growth companies including digital health services company, Babylon, Expedia businesses Home Away and VRBO.com, as well as government, telecom, and healthcare industries throughout his 25+ year career.

Procore is built around the idea of turning construction into a more seamless, collaborative process, and has centered its efforts on creating a platform that recognizes and tackles the unique challenges of the industry. In construction, every project is distinct, encompassing unique project teams, designs, materials, schedules, and regulatory requirements.

The construction workforce is notably mobile and decentralized, operating primarily on job sites rather than in a centralized office, making real-time access to project data and effective collaboration crucial. Complex stakeholder dynamics require precise communication among parties with different interests. Moreover, the constant nature of change in the industry necessitates tools that can adapt and handle frequent project modifications.

Procore’s software is designed to streamline project workflows, by allowing users to manage their work in a unified platform, from initial plan to final invoice, facilitating collaboration, enhancing efficiency, and driving project success. The platform consists of five integrated product categories – Preconstruction, Project Execution, Workforce Management, Financial Management, and Construction Intelligence – with each category offering easy-to-use features and customizable dashboards and analytical reports that enable informed and faster decision-making, thereby saving time, reducing risks, and improving project outcomes.

Using open application programming interfaces and an application marketplace, Procore allows customers to integrate products with their internal systems and over 400 integrations including accounting, document management, and scheduling software. This allows users to maximize the value of existing applications and create a truly interconnected construction project management ecosystem, while increasing the stickiness of the platform.

Customers range from small businesses managing a few million dollars of annual construction to global enterprises managing billions of dollars of volume. Users are spread across the spectrum of construction stakeholders from owners, to general, and specialty contractors such as architects, operating within the commercial, residential, industrial, and infrastructure segments. Each of Procore’s products can be accessed from the office or the job site on computers, smartphones, and tablets, enabling these users to work wherever the job requires.

Construction giants across the globe utilizing Procore’s services include Schneider Electric, AECOM, and Skanska. Use cases include everything from managing repurposed materials reducing both waste and carbon emissions to bringing tools and efficiencies together under one roof with all teams being connected to a single source of truth allowing products to be built quicker and safer.

The software products are primarily sold on a subscription basis, generally based on the number and mix of products a customer chooses. The business model is designed to encourage rapid, widespread adoption of products by allowing for unlimited users, without charges on a per-seat or per-user basis. As a result, customers can invite all project participants to engage with the platform as part of a project team.

Procore is grounded in a profound understanding of the construction industry. Beyond simply developing a suite of products and services that cater to the intricate requirements and diverse range of stakeholders, the company engages closely with the construction community to continually refine its products. Complimenting this plan is maintaining and advancing its technology leadership with continued investment in research and development to create innovative features and products that offer new levels of convenience and functionality to users.

Core to Procore’s strategy is its App Marketplace, as it provides extensive support in various categories including analytics, accounting and finance, scheduling, insurance, compliance, and customer relationship management, enabling the streamlining of various business processes while maintaining a single system of record. This integration strategy is increasingly seen as a requirement for adoption in the construction industry, making it a key competitive differentiator for the company.

As Procore looks towards growth, it sees the value of its business increasing across three key dimensions: ecosystem, products, and data. The company’s business model encourages widespread adoption by allowing unlimited users, increasing the value of the ecosystem. Their suite of feature-rich products is designed to solve the problems of the industry’s key stakeholders, with a focus on customization and accessibility. The platform also captures extensive data at every stage of a project, creating a comprehensive system of record that can be used to analyze project and industry trends.

The market for construction technology and collaboration tools is still in the early stages of adoption, as a result, customer acquisition is a key focus with plans to expand its sales and marketing efforts to increase awareness and grow its customer base. This includes turning collaborators – users who have been invited to participate in customers’ projects into customers themselves, as well as potential monetization of additional adjacent stakeholders.

Diversification of customer spend and international expansion are also key themes as Procore aims to drive additional spending from existing customers by engaging them in more projects, as well as building out its global sales force, customer experience teams, and overall presence in countries where they already operate.

Finally, strategic acquisitions have and are expected to continue to form a significant part of Procore’s growth strategy. The company has previously made several acquisitions that have added innovative features and functionality to its platform, while bringing talent to the team, and accelerating its end-to-end cloud-based platform strategy.

In particular, the App Marketplace serves as a source of potential acquisitions, providing visibility into customers’ interactions with many third-party integrations. In fact, in recent years, acquisitions have included Honest Buildings, a provider of financial and project management software for owners, Esticom, a leading estimating solution, Levelset, a lien rights management solution, and LaborChart, a labor-management solution, all of which were App Marketplace partners.

Procore has delivered an impressive trajectory of double-digit growth annually since the company went public. Total revenue hit $720.2 million in 2022, after achieving year-over-year growth of 40%. This strong trend has continued into 2023 as the first quarter again saw an increase of 34% after maintaining its traction in adding new organic customers, as well as a recent entry into the German market.

While Procore continues to operate at a loss due to heavy investments in expansion and improving the platform, the company’s gross margins are robust at a sector-leading 84%.

Looking forward, management is expecting to close out 2023 with total revenue in the range of $908 million to $912 million, in line with consensus expectations. This represents an expected year-over-year growth of between 26% to 27%. Analysts are expecting full-year earnings per share to record a loss of just $0.24 for FY23, representing a solid improvement of 53%, which is expected to also continue into FY24.

The competitive environment for construction management software is diverse and rapidly evolving. Although Procore is among the prominent players in a market that is still maturing, as many construction companies continue to employ basic, often manual workflows. The adoption of tech-based solutions, when present, is frequently constrained by a lack of modern, cloud-based tools, comprehensive functionality, or robust integration between solutions.

Competition arises from providers of aggregated construction management tools, including Oracle, Autodesk, and Trimble, whose products sometimes integrate with Procore’s platform and are accessible in its App Marketplace. Accounting software vendors, also supplement their offerings with project management tools, often presented as lower-value add-ons bundled with their core accounting solutions.

Competition also arises from specialized solution providers in areas like analytics, bidding, Building Information Modeling, compliance, scheduling, and materials financing. Many of these solutions can integrate with Procore’s platform and are available in its App Marketplace.

Given this landscape, Procore believes its competitive position is strengthened by its advanced, cloud-based platform, comprehensive functionality, and integration capabilities, which empower it to support critical workflows at scale.

As the construction industry evolves and the digitization trend gathers momentum, Procore’s offerings are well-positioned to meet emerging demands. Its cloud-based, integrative approach to construction management is not just redefining workflows, but also setting a new industry standard for a sector on the cusp of a digital revolution.