building-materials
(40)
Brad Crawford and the future that has to fit through the factory door
The Rival CEO buys established building businesses and backs construction robots. In Indiana, he is putting the two to work together - with people, production and a very ordinary nail at the center of the experiment.
Geoff Bennett and the distance between a factory and a finished home
Before becoming CEO of Trajus, Geoff Bennett led Cascade Windows through an acquisition and a $245 million sale. His next chapter moves inside the home, where cabinets, countertops, and construction schedules have to meet.
Dal-Tile’s real product is the distance between a good idea and a finished floor
A tile can win a showroom audition and still lose on the job site. Dal-Tile has spent decades building the factories, trade relationships and design tools that connect the two.
DMSi and the secret life of a lumber order
A custom door, a shifting delivery date, a Monday morning report. DMSi has spent five decades making software for the awkward details that building suppliers live with every day.
GlobalFair and the Case for Choosing One Aisle
It began as a cross-border marketplace for seven kinds of goods. Then its founders discovered that the valuable part was knowing exactly what would arrive at the job site.
Oceanside Glasstile Bought the Glass Behind the Tile
When its sheet-glass supplier shut down, Oceanside Glasstile bought the equipment and formulas. The move turned a decorative-tile maker into a supplier to the artists it had grown up admiring.
Nearmap’s billion-dollar view of your roof
The Australian company turned repeat aerial photography into a subscription business. Now it is following the insurance claim from the first overhead picture to the price of replacement materials.
Susan Selle Built a Career Making Everyday Products Mean More
From Crock-Pot and Mr. Coffee to windows, siding and a newly merged company, Susan Selle has spent more than three decades finding the human story inside practical products.
Loren Burnett Is Teaching Concrete to Borrow a Trick From the Sea
After five exits, the Colorado founder chose a harder material problem: turning microalgae, mineral chemistry and patient commercialization into concrete with a smaller carbon bill.
Sean Petterson Wants Plywood to Meet Its Replacement
After turning a student invention into an acquired industrial-safety company, Sean Petterson chose an older adversary: plywood. His second act is a lesson in selling change to factories that have no patience for disruption.
Christian MacDonald Built a Marketing Career From the Moulding Aisle Out
After 25 years across branches, products, customer experience, retail and marketing, Metrie's CMO has learned that trust is built where strategy meets the moulding aisle.
Émilie Gagné-Prud'homme Makes the Technical Feel Human
Before she marketed membranes and insulation, Émilie Gagné-Prud'homme worked behind the scenes in theatre and photography. Her career shows how creative production, customer empathy and technical fluency can meet inside one of Canada's most material businesses.
The Company Under Canada’s Roofs Is Turning Membranes Into a Climate Data Business
SOPREMA spent decades making the layers nobody sees. Now the Drummondville manufacturer is making those layers legible - with local factories, trained installers, carbon data and a growing stack of services around the building envelope.
Metrie Built a 100-Year Business by Cutting the Paint Job in Half
The family-owned millwork company survived a century by turning trim from an afterthought into a system. Its most useful lesson for builders is simple: sell fewer decisions, fewer job-site steps and fewer reasons for a callback.
The $30-a-Foot Fix for People Who Hate Their Windows - but Refuse to Rip Them Out
Indow built a climate-tech business around an unglamorous idea: keep the old window, measure it obsessively, and press a precisely cut acrylic panel into place. The first magnetic prototype failed. The stripped-down version became the product.
Reece Built a $9 Billion Business Selling the Parts Nobody Notices
A century after H.J. Reece sold hardware from a truck, his name sits atop a trade network built around an unglamorous promise: have the right part, the right advice and the right delivery ready when the job cannot wait.
The $5.3 Billion Company Hiding in Plain Sight on America’s Walls
Cornerstone Building Brands does not build the house. It makes much of what keeps the weather out - and has quietly assembled one of North America’s broadest portfolios of windows, siding, stone and metal systems.
Holcim
Holcim is trying to turn the oldest ingredients in construction into a newer kind of business - one that sells lower-carbon materials, recycles yesterday’s buildings and captures the emissions its kilns cannot yet avoid.
Andersen Corporation
Andersen spent 123 years turning the humble window into a system of materials, channels and service. Its next opening may be the part most manufacturers leave to someone else: installation.
Magnera Corporation
The materials inside diapers, surgical gowns, coffee capsules and weatherproof walls rarely get a headline. Magnera, born from a 2024 industrial merger and backed by 160 years of inherited know-how, makes a $3.2 billion business out of that invisibility.
Boise Cascade Company
Boise Cascade makes the beams and panels that hold buildings up - then uses one of America's largest wholesale networks to move them. That quiet loop produced $6.4 billion in 2025 sales and a revealing view of what happens before a house becomes a home.
Zekelman Industries
Most steel companies stop at the loading dock. Zekelman follows the material into warehouses, job sites and even finished apartments - a 149-year industrial lineage betting that control of the chain can make American construction faster and more predictable.
The Home Depot
The orange warehouse taught America to do it itself. Now Home Depot is building a second act around the pros, the supply chain and a deceptively ambitious idea: sell the whole project, not just the parts.
Philip Odelfelt
He walked away from hedge fund money to help old-line manufacturers see what is really happening on the shelf. Now Philip Odelfelt is turning messy retail data into a $27 million bet on the building materials industry.
Datavations
Datavations is a New York-based, AI-powered market intelligence platform built exclusively for manufacturers and distributors in the building materials and home improvement industries. It aggregates granular, store-level and SKU-level retail data across thousands of stores to give suppliers the cross-retailer visibility they otherwise lack - helping them optimize pricing, inventory, and product assortment, and walk into merchant meetings armed with data their retail partners don't have. Founded in 2020 by Philip Odelfelt, the company raised a $17M Series A in July 2025 led by Forestay Capital.
Dextall
Dextall is a New York-founded construction technology company that pairs proprietary design software with factory-built, unitized prefabricated exterior wall panels for mid- and high-rise buildings. Its platform turns architectural concepts into fabrication-ready models and delivers a modular facade system manufactured by regional partners, cutting design-to-install timelines and on-site labor while improving building energy performance. The company raised a $15M Series A in July 2025 to expand its AI-powered prefab platform and address the housing crisis.
AICrete Corp.
AICrete Corp. is a Richmond, California company building AICreteOS, the first AI-powered operating system for the concrete and aggregates industry. Founded by UC Berkeley PhD Parham Aghdasi, it unifies quality control and operations - connecting batch, dispatch and truck data into one platform - to cut concrete costs by over $3 per cubic yard and reduce CO2 by an average of 42 lbs per cubic yard. The company raised over $9 million in seed funding led by Clear Ventures.
Alquist 3D
Alquist 3D is a Greeley, Colorado-based construction technology company that uses robotic 3D concrete printing to build homes, commercial buildings, and infrastructure. Founded in 2020 by Zachary Mannheimer, the company completed one of the first 3D-printed Habitat for Humanity homes in the U.S. and printed an ~8,000-square-foot addition to a Walmart in Athens, Tennessee - billed as the largest 3D-printed commercial structure in the country. In late 2025 it announced a landmark deal to print more than a dozen Walmart and retail buildings, positioning itself to commercialize 3D concrete printing at national scale.
Pathways
Pathways is a New York climate-tech startup building an AI platform that automates life cycle assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material manufacturers, starting with ready-mix concrete producers. By ingesting data from a manufacturer's existing systems - raw material inputs, transportation, and plant processes - Pathways turns a process that traditionally takes 6-12 months of consultant work into one that delivers third-party-verified EPDs in weeks, then keeps the models live so producers can spot emissions hotspots and cut the carbon footprint of their products.
Tangible
Tangible is a San Francisco climate-tech company that turns static construction drawings and 3D models into live materials data. Its AI-powered platform reads Revit models and PDF drawings to give preconstruction teams structured quantities, cost, and EPD-backed embodied carbon in one place - so developers, contractors, and architects can see the carbon and cost impact of a design and cut both before a building is ever poured. Founded in 2021 by Anneli Tostar and Nicole Granath, Tangible has raised roughly $8.8M and counts builders like Skanska, Prologis, and Hensel Phelps among its users.