Startups have been regarding construction as an industry ripe for automation in the last seven-eight months, said Manesh Jain, cofounder, Flo Mobility. “So that’s one significant shift which is happening,” he said. The company offers a construction-focused robotics platform.
Security, health, safety, compliance (HSC) standards and productivity are particularly amenable to automation solutions. “We saw early signs of this in warehouses and manufacturing assembly lines a few years ago, and now there is an uptick in adoption across the construction industry,” Jain said.
Flo Mobility’s robots move materials at construction sites, level floors and are also used to finish walls. Currently deployed mostly in India and West Asia, the company is actively exploring the US market. AttentiveAI offers AI-powered software for pre-construction needs, including solutions for subcontractors and suppliers to help with estimates. The company also offers a product for field jobs such as landscaping, facilities maintenance and snow removal.
ETtech“When we launched our first product, Beam Field Services, in 2021, we focused on the landscaping business as we wanted to focus only on a particular segment of construction instead of the entire market,” said cofounder Shiva Dhawan. “We reached a $1 million annual revenue run rate (ARR) in a year.” The company launched its second product, BeamAI for Construction, in 2023. This automates the pre-construction estimation phase, which includes computing cost estimates and preparing bids, which is the work of a junior estimator. Since the launch of the second product, ARR is touching $12 million ARR amid rising demand.
Attentive AI focuses on commercial contractors.
“If I were to give you a few numbers, there are around 10,000 commercial landscaping contractors, and there are 600,000 construction contractors,” Dhawan said. “This is just in the US, which is the biggest market and our focus area. The 600,000 contractors in the US, they would be spending north of $10 billion to $15 billion. So the market is huge.”
A construction robot maker’s founder said it’s seeing demand for plumbing and painting jobs in the US due to a labour shortage. The company has four robot types for residences, offices, hotels and warehouses, and is in talks to raise funds.
Given the potential, venture capital firms are keen to invest. Flo Mobility is in the process of raising $2.5 million. Attentive AI raised $30 million led by Insight Venture Partners in its Series B round last year. In 2025, Y Combinator funded six startups working in the construction industry.
Companies such as Pidilite and Sobha have invested in Pace Robotics, a robotics startup focused on construction.
The West Asia conflict though is hitting business in the region, Jain said. Flo Mobility had started deploying robots in Dubai and was seeing potential for expansion before the war began. “Things are on hold for now,” he said. While India’s urban centres are seeing construction at scale, adoption of AI is slow. Being a low labour cost market, value realisations are not as lucrative and startups need to juggle between price competitiveness and unit economics, making it difficult to achieve scale, Jain said.
“That said, India is definitely a good launchpad to test the waters. We have around 70 deployments across 15 different cities in India,” he said.
