We spent the last few months interviewing the people building construction safety technology – the founders of Navatech, HammerTech, and Breadcrumb, plus Procore’s safety product leadership. Those conversations became four podcast episodes (dropping weekly) and a full intelligence report, The State of Construction Safety Tech, which is free and lands this Friday. Reserve your copy here. Below: four insights from the series that should worry, and maybe excite, anyone who builds, buys, or invests in this space.
Construction is still the most dangerous major industry in the developed world. Not by a little. In the US, more people die on construction sites than in any other private industry. And here’s the uncomfortable part: there is more safety technology on the market than ever before, more funding flowing into the category, more AI demos at every trade show – and the fatality rate has barely moved in over a decade.
So we went and asked the people closest to the problem. Over four long-form conversations, we sat down with Prakash Senghani (co-founder and CEO of Navatech), Ben Leach and Andrew Barron (CEO and CPO of HammerTech), Simon Elliott (CEO of Breadcrumb), and Juliana Richard Butler (Director of Product for Quality, Safety and Media at Procore). All answering the same question from different angles: why hasn’t technology fixed construction’s worst number?
The full answers are in the episodes, releasing weekly on the Bricks & Bytes podcast, and in the report. Here’s a taste of what came out of those rooms.
Insight 1: The number that refuses to move
From the HammerTech episode with Ben Leach and Andrew Barron
Ben Leach spent over a decade inside large general contractors before founding HammerTech, and his framing of the problem is blunt: construction leads the world in workplace fatalities, and that hasn’t been a secret for a long time. The US recorded 1,075 construction deaths in 2023 – roughly one in five of all workplace deaths in the country – at a rate of 9.6 per 100,000 workers. That rate has hovered around 10 for more than ten years.
The number is high, and for the last decade or two it hasn’t materially improved on a percentage basis. It’s got safer, there’s more people working, but the number hasn’t dramatically shifted.Andrew Barron, Chief Product Officer, HammerTech
The episode digs into why. Spend clusters around incidents after they happen, not prevention before they do. And the most common “system” HammerTech competes against isn’t another software vendor. It’s Excel spreadsheets and point solutions stitched together by hand. We covered HammerTech’s $70M raise back when it happened – this conversation explains what that capital is actually up against.
Insight 2: Digital forms are not digital transformation
From the Navatech episode with Prakash Senghani
Prakash got into safety tech for personal reasons – his dad was a carpenter who had to retire in his mid-forties because of injuries. After years leading digital transformation at AECOM, JLL, and Balfour Beatty, he noticed safety was always the afterthought: a form bolted onto a project management tool, a box to tick.
His sharpest observation is about what the industry calls progress. Taking a paper form and making it digital is digitalization, not transformation – and sometimes it makes things worse. Sites drown in low-quality data, and in some cases the digital form takes longer to fill out than the paper one did. Meanwhile, the real safety conversations happen in WhatsApp groups, and sanitized summaries get copied into the official system afterwards.
- The ROI paradox. Safety’s job is to prove a negative. How do you show the accident that didn’t happen, and how do you fund a function that succeeds by being invisible?
- Why tick-box training fails. A PowerPoint in English to a multilingual workforce, a signature sheet, a quiz people copy from their mate. What tailored, contextual training looks like instead.
- The threat nobody expected. Why Prakash worries less about Procore or Autodesk and more about his own customers building tools in-house with AI coding assistants.
Insight 3: “Safety third” – and why productivity is the way in
From the Breadcrumb episode with Simon Elliott
Simon Elliott built Breadcrumb in Australia and the UK, markets where directors can go to jail for getting safety wrong. Then he took it to the US and got a reality check on a conference bus, where an industry veteran told him: first you’ve got to get the job, then it’s got to be profitable, and then we might think about safety. Safety third.
What happened next is the most interesting commercial story in the series. Breadcrumb found its way into US contractors through productivity, not compliance: shaving seven minutes off every worker orientation, giving superintendents live visibility of who is on site, killing the 3am paperwork sessions. The safety outcomes followed. And the data center boom, with owners like Google and Amazon demanding accountability on their sites, is now creating the commercial pressure that regulation never quite managed in the States.
Simon also has a contrarian take on the flashiest corner of the category: computer vision and AI site monitoring. His view? Most of the industry isn’t ready for it yet. You’ll want to hear his reasoning in full.
The State of Construction Safety Tech drops Friday
Market map, operator insights, and where the category goes next. An intelligence report for founders, investors, and safety leaders. Completely free.
Reserve Your Free CopyInsight 4: Adoption is a technology problem, not a worker problem
From the Procore episode with Juliana Richard Butler
Juliana came to construction from healthcare, another industry full of highly skilled people doing high-risk work. Her position on the industry’s favorite excuse is refreshing: when field workers don’t use safety software, that’s a failure of the software, not the workers.
You shouldn’t compare to the flavor of the month construction app. You should compare it to the best app in the app store.Juliana Richard Butler, Director of Product for Quality, Safety and Media, Procore
The episode goes deep on what actually drives field adoption: designing for the physical reality of a job site, QR code access points instead of forgotten logins, offline capability for floor 50 of a skyscraper. Her warning for buyers stuck with us – too many contractors are managing a portfolio of safety products instead of running a safety program. One bought for this job, another for that owner requirement, and nobody doing the same thing twice.
The series at a glance
Four episodes, four vantage points, one question
| Episode | Guest | Vantage point | The question they answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navatech | Prakash Senghani, Co-founder & CEO | AI-native safety startup | Why digitizing forms made safety data worse, and what AI changes |
| HammerTech | Ben Leach, CEO & Andrew Barron, CPO | Scaled safety platform ($70M backed) | Why the fatality rate is stuck, and what connected data can do about it |
| Breadcrumb | Simon Elliott, CEO | Worker-first field platform | How productivity, not compliance, gets safety tech onto US sites |
| Procore | Juliana Richard Butler, Director of Product | The industry’s biggest platform | What actually drives field adoption at scale |
Episodes release weekly on the Bricks & Bytes podcast and our YouTube channel. The report ties it all together with the market landscape, the operators to watch, and where the smart money thinks this category is heading. Reserve your free copy before Friday.
It’s a free intelligence report from Bricks & Bytes covering the construction safety technology market: the operators building in the space, how the category is evolving, and what’s next for founders, investors, and safety leaders. It was built on the back of our four-episode interview series with Navatech, HammerTech, Breadcrumb, and Procore, and it releases this Friday. (Source)
Reserve a copy on the Bricks & Bytes downloads page and it will land in your inbox on release day. It’s completely free. (Source)
One episode per week, starting alongside the report launch. You’ll find them on the Bricks & Bytes podcast feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. (Source)
In the US, construction recorded 1,075 fatalities in 2023, the highest of any private industry and roughly one in five of all workplace deaths, at a rate of 9.6 per 100,000 full-time workers. In Great Britain, construction recorded 35 worker deaths in 2024/25, more than any other sector. (Source)
Slowly, and unevenly. The US fatality rate has hovered around 10 per 100,000 workers for more than a decade, while GB deaths fell from 45 in 2022/23 to 35 in 2024/25. The long-term trend is positive, but the plateau in the US rate is exactly what our podcast guests are trying to break. (Source)
Every guest in the series gave a version of the same answer: adoption. Software that field workers won’t open produces no data, and no data means no prevention. The episodes cover how each company tackles this differently, from QR code access points to productivity wins that make site teams want to use the tools. (Source)
The State of Construction Safety Tech – Bricks & Bytes Intelligence
National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2023 – US Bureau of Labor Statistics
Work-related fatality statistics 2024/25 – Health and Safety Executive
Construction fatalities hit highest number since 2011 – Construction Dive
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