Building out its project management platform further into preconstruction, Procore announced on Oct. 27 that it has acquired estimating software maker Esticom.
based in Austin, Texas, Esticom primarily serves construction estimators at specialty contractors, automating much of the takeoff and bid-preparation process. With more than 1,000 customers and roughly 1,600 users, the company has been expanding to general contractors and concrete contractors recently. Its software has had an integration with Procore’s project management software platform for the last year. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“We have all this data in our system, and now we’re closing the loop with estimating,” says Wyatt Jenkins, Procore senior vice president for product. He notes that Procore’s customers have been increasingly asking for all their project data to flow in through the same system. “They want us to get into preconstruction,” he explains. “They want all that work they do in preconstruction to flow into the rest of course of construction.”
Esticom co-founder and CEO Chris Lee says “our goal was always to do estimating and takeoff and be the best at that. Because of this [acquisition] we can focus on doing the takeoff and estimating, and now push that data into Procore.”
Esticom’s software currently allows for companies to build out bid documents from takeoffs, saving time and reducing errors. Lee says that many estimators are still working across multiple point solutions to manage their bids and takeoffs, with plenty more still laboring away in Excel spreadsheets. “We wanted to do all the estimating and takeoff work in a single platform, and make sure we didn’t just build another point solution,” he explains. “The real magic is taking takeoff data and flowing it into estimating to creates the proposal.”
Getting that bid and preconstruction work into the construction flow was already on Esticom’s roadmap before the Procore acquisition, says Lee.
“When an estimator goes and bids on projects and wins projects, they'll be able to click a button and hand that off to the project manager who can create a schedule based on budgeting data,” he says. “Now that data is all there, and you don’t have to print out plans and go into spreadsheets to do a project breakdown.”
While there are already integrations between Esticom and Procore, these connections are going to go deeper, with construction performance data and actual costs eventually flowing back into Esticom to better inform future bids. “We are doing a lot of R&D in project financials right now,” says Jenkins. “So we can have the financial data connect back into the estimating data. It’s an interesting loop.”
But just matching data from preconstruction to construction opens up new possibilities, says Lee. “The biggest benefit in integrating with Procore is in the project budget and cost controls—what you need to do that will just flow over. Cost codes, labor cost codes, materials, it’s all in there.”
Lee tells ENR that there are no immediate plans to change Esticom’s pricing structure or the software’s interface, but users should expect to see tighter integrations with Procore’s platform being added through next year.
