FAQ

AEC Labs (the “AEC” stands for “architecture, engineering, and construction”) is a website that analyzes the technologies, startups, venture capital, delivery models, and financing mechanisms that are changing the modern construction industry. Our team typically publishes two new articles per week that may report on companies and transactions of interest or be longer, original pieces of content that analyze key trends and issues that the industry is grappling with.

AEC Labs was founded by Stephen Del Percio, a civil engineer by training with nearly two decades of experience in the trenches of the construction industry, both as a project manager and an attorney. Stephen also took a two-year sabbatical from the industry inside Amazon.com, an experience which sparked his interested in how tech could be applied to, and ultimately improve, the AEC industry

We hope so! Most of what we discuss here at AEC Labs has the potential to change the built environment in dramatic ways that will affect everyone, everywhere, no matter what.

Our longest (by word count) but also most significant effort is our article about the future of blockchain technology in construction, which we believe could be the most transformative of any of the technologies we have discussed here to date. We plan to take a deeper dive into these top 5 in future articles, so stay tuned.

Simple! Email us, tweet at us (@AEC_Labs), like us on Facebook, or send us a message using the form on our contact page. We are super responsive and will get back to you in short order. We love to spotlight new companies, technologies, events, hackathons, and other stories that would be of interest to our growing community of readers and industry professionals.

We are laser-focused right now on generating great content and building our community, so we don’t have a formal advertising or sponsorship program in place. That being said, we are happy to discuss how your organization could be featured more prominently on our site as a partner or sponsor – contact us if you’d like to discuss.

Again, start with our contact page or reach out directly to us or our founder, Stephen Del Percio, on Twitter at @AEC_Labs or @StephenDP.

Construction tech, or contech, or the hashtag #contech, is very generally how we describe new technologies in the AEC industry, from BIM and other software tools to startups and venture capital firms.

We consider contech to be a growing subset of proptech (or property tech or real estate tech) which has seen a much larger amount of venture capital investment over the past few years. (Proptech investment topped $1.5B in 2015, compared with not quite $500M contech deals in 2017 – more on that below.)

In 2017, according to CB Insights, there were 56 contech deals totaling $433M in funding as of October 2017 (two of which were over $50M). These numbers are dramatic increases from just $51M in 2010 to $254M in 2015, which we believe portends well for the future of contech and the AEC industry at large.

Broadly speaking, it’s any kind of construction project that is delivered outside of a traditional design-bid-build model (where the owner hires a designer to develop ready-for-construction drawings and specifications, which contractors then bid on, typically with a lump sum price.) These include design-build, construction management at-risk (CMAR), EPC, P3s, and others – you can read more about the pros and cons of alternative delivery in this article we published here at AEC Labs.

Unique may be the wrong word, but from a designer’s perspective it is different than traditional design-bid-build because the owner only holds one contract, and the designer is now working for a contractor, whose priorities and goals for a project are fundamentally different from the owner’s. This presents new risks, new insurance issues, and other dramatic shifts in how stakeholders have thought about project delivery previously.

We believe that the lack of efficiency across the construction industry has multiple sources, one of which is the outdated procurement models that are required in many jurisdictions. Alternative delivery has the potential to streamline those models, which is why we believe it is an important part of the conversation here at AEC Labs.