Disruption of the $10 trillion global construction industry

There are several companies that are ramping up technology to disrupt the $10 trillion global construction industry.

Some leading companies are:

Factory enhanced construction
* Katerra
* Broad Group

Robotic bricklaying
* Fastbrick Robotics
* Construction robotics

Katerra customized factory produced panels

Construction startup Katerra creates custom panels and modules from detailed custom architectural plans. They will source all parts for a detailed building design and build it in a factory and then send modules for onsite assembly. Katerra’s post-money valuation is more than $3 billion. They received $865 million in investment from Softbank and had already gotten over $200 million in funding.

Katerra runs the process of getting a building up and people inside it from the architectural design components all the way through labor management and renovation.

In January 2018, Katerra said it had $1.3 billion in customer bookings so far for new construction ranging from residential to hospitality and student housing.

Over the past 80 years, industries in the U.S. such as manufacturing and agriculture have increased their productivity by 10 to 15 times, but one industry seems stuck in place: construction. Construction has enjoyed the lowest productivity gains of any industry over the past twenty years – which presents an opportunity for firms to leverage technology and digital supply chains to dramatically improve productivity in the $10 trillion industry.

Broad Group

Broad Sustainable Building is a construction company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Broad Group, specializing in developing prefabricated buildings. They build the parts for high rises in a factory and deliver all of the parts for one section on a truck for onsite assembly.

They built J57, a 57-story mixed-use building in just 19 days. They built a 15-story building in 2 days.

BSB claims prefab reduces construction costs by 20% to 40%. The 180,000 square meter Mini Sky City cost US$700 per square meter to build.

Prefabricated building market

Prefabricated building comprises of factory-made units or components that are transported and assembledRobotic Bricklaying

Fastbrick Robotics Limited is an Australian robotic technology company developing and commercializing digital construction technology solutions, including the revolutionary commercial bricklaying machine, Hadrian X. The Hadrian X construction robot is on track to being completed by the end of the second quarter of 2018.

Fastbrick is now targeting 2 percent of the global market within the next five years, approximately 600,000 low-rise buildings a year. They had a market study which indicated that 150,000 Hadrian X construction robots could replace all home construction workers in the world. Thus they would need to make and sell 3000 Hadrian X construction robots by 2023 in order to hit their 2% target.

Construction Robotics has a collobarative robot which boosts the productivity of human bricklayers by five times.