Procore is acquiring lien management and construction payments technology company Levelset for $500 million. The acquisition includes roughly $425 million in cash and $75 million in Procore common stock,最初于5月发行. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

该交易将是Procore有史以来最大的收购，首席执行官Tooey Courtemanche表示将成为建筑管理技术公司平台的重要组成部分。在今年晚些时候完成交易后，收购级别集将在Procore的平台上添加留置权管理。

"The number one problem that we wanted to solve in 2022 was lien rights management," Courtemanche says. "It's a priority for Procore to finish these complex workflows for our customers. So, definitely we are going to be looking at what the most expeditious route is here, but we also have to remember, we're serving the small-to-medium business, the mid-market in the enterprise, we're serving owners, general contractors and specialty contractors."

解决付款问题

Management consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a report that it takes an average of 83 days for payment to reach contractors after invoicing. Courtemanche says that ever since Procore began adding financials to its platform in 2017, he knew the many stakeholders and processes involved in construction would pose a challenge for creating effective products for contractors.

Courtemanche says the workflows involved were long and complicated because they crossed so many different stakeholders from bidding to estimating to change orders and that contracting instruments such as G702 and G703 documents for invoicing and scheduling already had established processes built around them. Compliance is also intertwined with bidding and payments, he adds.

自2012年以来，LevelSet一直在研究陷入建设中的许多问题，当时它是由首席执行官斯科特·沃尔夫（Scott Wolfe）在新奥尔良建立的。水平集试图解决的特定疼痛点novel approachwas areview platformfor subcontractors that provides company profiles that rate general contractors and owners as slow, medium or fast payers.

"This is a really complicated, manual area that contractors, vendors, suppliers, general contractors, owners—they all struggle with it. We've been beating that drum for years and succeeding at modernizing it for thousands of companies," Wolfe says.

Both Wolfe and Courtemanche say it will take new approaches and processes to address modernizing construction payments. Courtemanche says Levelset will operate largely the same as it has an independent company until more development and integration into Procore's platform can be built in 2022. Levelset was already an application partner of Procore.

沃尔夫说：“如果您想到Procore在全球平台上连接所有利益相关者的使命，那么对留置权的有趣的一件事就是他们实际上确实将利益相关者联系起来，它会使他们处于风险状态。”“我们必须从一开始就建立我们的平台，思考我们如何联系所有不同的利益相关者，因为在我们看来，实现留置权权利的唯一途径是使所有利益相关者保持联系并在现代平台。”

Courtemanche says the acquisition will also give Procore access to industry data, including payments and compliance activity, allowing it to deliver risk intelligence to our customers, and to develop more financial products. He also says that combining Procore and Levelset's customer data will allow the combined company to provide analysis of individual user performance and industrywide risk trends.

What the Data Tells You

"Data really does help you assess risk because you can actually get down to to the lowest detail to understand where risk really occurs and where it doesn't," Courtemanche says. "I think we just have a better view of risk than most folks out there."

他说，Procore的数据图已经被美国和其他组织相关的总承包商使用track construction trends, and the Levelset data graph with its risk and payment information will make a powerful combination of data from which artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms can predict trends and outcomes.

Courtemanche说：“机器学习工程师和数据科学家可以看出，没有什么比这更令人兴奋了。”“我只是有机会与LevelSet的团队会面，他们的数据团队也非常强大。”

Breaking New Ground

It's a busy time for Procore, as the company will again be holding itsGroundbreak ConferenceOct. 12-14 virtually. Both Courtemanche and senior vice president of product Wyatt Jenkins said that the company's IPO has allowed it to invest in acquisitions and enhancements to its platform. Several new enhancements to Procore's platform have already been announced ahead of the virtual conference such as a new, collaborative document management tool with integrated markup and specific construction workflows. Procore also expanded its infrastructure with 11 new data centers. There are now 15 data centers in total that allow customers to store project data locally in Procore's network.

“我们的工作流引擎工作在Procore任何工具,whether it's documents or files or invoices, wherever you go in Procore, whatever tool you're using, you can just dip down into the workflow engine, click onto it and a little sidebar comes up and it shows a diagram of a workflow," Jenkins says. "If you want it to go to this person or this person to approve things, you can, and now you've created a workflow."

詹金斯（Jenkins）补充说，该公司的最大竞争对手仍然是电子表格和纸上的墨水表格，他，Courtemanche和Wolfe都说，数字化施工工作流的挑战仍然是建筑平台提供商致力于解决的挑战。