Procore to acquire DroneDeploy for $845M

Contech giant Procore has entered an agreement to acquire DroneDeploy for $845 million in cash, according to a Wednesday announcement. The deal is subject to customary purchase price adjustments and is expected to close later this year. Procore will combine its hundreds of millions of drawings and photos with DroneDeploy's 20 trillion square feet of visual data. Ajei Gopal, president and CEO of Procore, said in the announcement that the companies will sell one another's solutions to their client bases when the acquisition closes. The combination aims to let builders use cameras, drones and robots to regularly evaluate jobsites and automatically initiate appropriate responses. Procore's dataset includes nearly 400 million photos, more than 126 million drawings and over 10 million requests for information, submittals and inspections recorded in the last year. DroneDeploy offers tens of millions of user-generated annotations and more than 100,000 labeled safety issues. Gopal said adding DroneDeploy's technology will accelerate Procore's AI strategy and deliver digital coworkers that track project activity and take action to change outcomes. The acquisition follows Procore's January purchase of Datagrid, a vertical AI firm. Meg Baldini, vice president of corporate development and partnerships at Procore, said acquisitions are a tool to accelerate strategy rather than the strategy itself. Other recent contech deals include Autodesk's acquisition of Rhumbix and Trimble's agreement to acquire Document Crunch.