“We don’t dilute our focus”: HammerTech nails $105 million raise

Construction software startup HammerTech has secured a $105 million raise led by Riverwood Capital at an undisclosed valuation. This follows a $10 million Series A back in 2019.

Founded in 2013, HammerTech offers a SaaS solution for safety, compliance and site management on construction sites. It finds SafetyCulture amongst its competitors, despite it being a double unicorn with a $2.7 billion valuation.

“We have always focussed specifically on the needs of construction. We don’t dilute our focus outside of the built environment – the industry is too high-risk for corporate solutions and live construction sites require very specific safety management and engagement processes to include the worker,” HammerTech co-founder and CEO, Ben Leach, said to SmartCompany.

“Because we began with the highly engineered construction-specific processes, the data and visibility across safety and field operations we provide our clients with is more comprehensive than any other solution on the market.”

According to Leach, construction sites have the highest number of workplace fatalities in any industry, but many of these are preventable.

“Our impact is both across the safety of the organisation and also in helping teams spend less time on paperwork and more time on higher leverage items. We help builders crowd-source safety efforts from their subcontractors which increases buy-in to safety and we also engage workers,” Leach said.

Leach provided specific examples, such as its subcontractor and worker onboarding, which is said to improve risk visibility and reduce the
processing time of inductions. The platform also enables workplaces to go beyond relying on historical data — such as injuries and incident reports.

“Our dashboards provide people in different roles with data that is pro-active. For example, is everyone on-site trained as required, were subcontractors prepared and compliant before arriving to site,” Leach said.

A case study with Kapitol Group also revealed HammerTech data found a trend of hand laceration issues across the company. This resulted in the implementation of a new PPE requirement for gloves. The platform then saw a downtrend in injuries.

“As projects become more complex, technologies must go beyond digitising forms. We need to make day-to-day processes and activities easier for site teams so they can focus on working safely and doing what they do best – building,” Leach said.

According to HammerTech, it will be using part of the investment to grow the business and R&D, including AI integration.

The company envisions use cases in the future such as safety plan reviews to flag issues and hazard suggestions for daily briefings.

“Today, AI provides the opportunity to help field and safety teams efficiently prepare and process safety information. There is a lot of interest in prediction, however the right data is not yet available for prediction and further investment is needed across the industry to continue to build a foundation,” Leach said.

We believe that AI should be integrated into systems so seamlessly that it is a deep value add and it can play a huge role in making existing safety processes and field workflows more efficient and of higher quality.”

HammerTech is already looking towards the future, with plans for further international growth and new features and technologies injected into the platform — but it’s not divulging specifics just yet.

“What we can share is that we intend to invest in connecting HammerTech with the broader construction technology ecosystem to leverage data insights that drive new value for clients,” Leach said.

“There are opportunities to provide HammerTech’s insights to new stakeholders and integrations and partnerships are a key part of making this a reality.”

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