Construction technology companies raise venture money, hire marketers from software companies, and inherit a playbook built for a different buyer. The playbook says announce your round in the technology press, publish frequently, and optimize the funnel. None of it was written for marketing to general contractors.
The buyer is a general contractor, a trade contractor, a developer or a facilities director. In my experience, they get their information from the publications that cover their industry and from peers, not from technology press, and they trust both more than they trust a vendor.
That mismatch can produce a specific failure: a sales campaign that lands only in outlets the buyers never see. The better approach is to put the story in the trade publications they already read and let another contractor tell it.
Key takeaways
- Brickeye's $10 million Series B ran first as an Engineering News-Record exclusive in January 2026: an industry trend piece on how builders' risk insurance was starting to dictate jobsite decisions, in which the round got one sentence and a customer had the first quote and the last word.
- BuildOps' $127 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, in March 2025, went to TechCrunch, Reuters, The Information and the Los Angeles Business Journal, the press investors read.
- Each audience has its own press: trade titles for contractors and developers, business and technology press for investors, and regional media for hiring, as when North Carolina's governor announced BuildOps' 291-job Raleigh hub in June 2025.
What works when marketing to general contractors?
Engineering News-Record, Construction Dive, and the trade titles serving each specialty (mechanical, electrical, roofing, concrete) reach the people who approve deployments. For a campaign aimed at contractors, I'd put those publications first, because their readers are the buyers.
We tested this deliberately with Brickeye. They came to us with a $10 million Series B and the obvious plan would have been a funding story in the tech press. Instead we placed an exclusive in ENR, because ENR reaches the contractors and developers who decide whether jobsite technology gets installed.
The story wasn't the round. Our pitch opened on a scene: two in the morning, a forty-story tower, a water line ruptures with nobody on site, and forty-five seconds later the system shuts the water off by itself. 1,650 gallons contained. Construction IoT is crowded with companies claiming to monitor jobsites; the distinction was that this one intervenes.
ENR ran it as an industry trend piece with Brickeye as the answer. We set up three interviews, one of them with a customer who spoke to the reporter for seventy-five minutes, and a customer opens and closes the published article. Then it carried into Axios Pro Rata, TechCrunch StrictlyVC, The Logic and BetaKit, plus the Globe and Mail, Yahoo Finance, USA Today and 737 syndication sites.
The funding got covered. It got covered as a consequence of an industry story rather than as the story.
For a construction software client, we set up news alerts and an automation that pulls the day's articles, filters them down to the three most relevant, and suggests the best op-ed angle and where to place it. Within two weeks of building it, it surfaced a great story. We wrote an op-ed the day after the news broke and placed it in Construction Dive, which we hadn't broken into until then.
When does mainstream coverage matter for construction tech?
Mainstream coverage still matters for a construction technology company. It's for a different audience and a different purpose.
BuildOps came to us in early 2024 having raised $86 million and heading into Series C conversations. Vertical SaaS for skilled trades is two categories that don't naturally attract mainstream technology coverage, and the CEO needed credibility beyond trade press before those investor meetings.
So we built executive positioning first — bylines in Newsweek and Forbes on workforce modernization and military leadership — establishing him as an authority before the conversations started, with Entrepreneur bylines to follow. Then the $127 million round and unicorn valuation went out through TechCrunch, Reuters, The Information and LA Business Journal, framed as validation for the construction technology category rather than as one company's news.
The Raleigh expansion showed the third register: the state governor announced the East Coast headquarters at a press conference, the mayor attended the ribbon cutting, the CEO appeared on NYSE TV, and coverage ran through Axios Raleigh, Triangle Business Journal, ABC11 and WRAL.
Three different audiences — investors, the industry, and a region where they were hiring 291 people — each reached through the press that audience actually reads.
The practical rule
Decide who the coverage is for before choosing where to place it.
Selling to contractors? Trade press, with a story about their problem and a peer describing the outcome.
Raising money? Business and technology press, with executive positioning built months earlier rather than announced alongside the round.
Hiring in a market? Regional business press and local broadcast, with a story about local jobs and the company's plans for the market.
Choose the outlets separately for each audience.
What doesn't work
In my experience, the habits that fail with construction buyers come with the software playbook.
Leading with the technology. Contractors buy outcomes on jobs, and the one most of them are short of now is capacity they can't hire. The mechanism is context.
Publishing on a software cadence. Publish when you have something useful for the buyer's evaluation, rather than treating frequency as the goal.
Announcing pilots. This industry has watched a decade of them. Wait for a result.
Skipping the customer. Peer reference is the currency here. Everything else is preamble.
Common questions
How do you market to general contractors? Reach them where they already get information: the trade publications that cover their part of the industry, such as Engineering News-Record and Construction Dive, and the peers they ask. Lead with a problem they have on jobs and let a contractor customer describe the result. Funding news and product features are context, not the story.
Where should construction technology companies focus PR? Trade press for buyers, business and technology press for investors and recruiting, and regional media for market expansion. Decide which audience each story is for first, then choose the outlets that audience actually reads.
Why does trade press matter in construction? Trade publications put a construction technology story in front of the industry audience that buys it: contractors, developers and facilities teams. In my view that makes them the first stop for a campaign aimed at buyers, though their value depends on which buyers read the outlet and what the campaign needs to do.
How should a construction tech company announce funding? As the occasion for an industry story rather than as the story. Pitch an industry angle to the publications your buyers read, and offer the funding news separately to the business and technology reporters who cover rounds.
What convinces a contractor to adopt new technology? Another contractor describing what happened on a real project, with numbers. In my view that carries more weight than a vendor's own claims, so include a customer in the pitch from the start and let the reporter ask about the results directly.
Sources
- Bryan Gottlieb, When Builders' Risk Insurance Starts Dictating Jobsite Decisions, Engineering News-Record, January 19, 2026
- Brickeye, Brickeye Raises $10M Series B to Scale Construction Risk Mitigation Technology Across North America and Beyond, ACCESS Newswire, January 20, 2026
- Aleksandra Sagan, Toronto construction tech startup Brickeye raises $10M, The Logic, January 20, 2026
- Mary Ann Azevedo, Commercial services platform BuildOps becomes a unicorn, raises $127M, TechCrunch, March 21, 2025
- Akash Sriram, BuildOps valued at $1 billion in funding round, plans to scale operations amid strong demand, Reuters, March 21, 2025
- Office of the Governor of North Carolina, Governor Stein Announces Software Company BuildOps Will Create 291 Jobs in Raleigh, June 24, 2025
- NYSE TV, Alok Chanani, CEO, BuildOps Talks Expansion on the East Coast
- Salient PR case studies: Brickeye (2026) and BuildOps (2024 to present)
Salient PR works with construction technology companies, including BuildOps' path from Series B to unicorn and Brickeye's Series B campaign in Engineering News-Record.
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