Celebrating DroneDeploy's Next Chapter

‍Today, we are thrilled to share that DroneDeploy, the robotics and visual intelligence platform for the built world that is used on over 3 million jobsites across more than 180 countries, has signed an agreement to be acquired by Procore, the leading global provider of construction management software. The $845 million deal marks Energize's fourth acquisition in the past year and forms the next-generation platform to see, understand, and act on the jobsite. This is an exciting step for DroneDeploy and a defining win for AI-native solutions enabling the build-out behind the energy transition.

The Software Solution Delivering Scale

When we founded Energize Capital in 2017, we did so with the conviction that the energy transition would be the defining economic transformation of our time. A transformation of that scale needs new physical infrastructure (a lot of it!) but also robust digital systems that plan, maintain, and coordinate those new assets.

At that time, renewable deployment was just at the beginning of its historic upswing in the U.S. Demand for clean energy was growing, and developers and utilities were building projects faster than they could inspect and manage them. As we spoke with stakeholders, we started to hear a common theme: reliable, scalable reality capture would be essential to manage asset development and construction, and eventually to enable O&M in a capital efficient manner.

So, we kicked off a deep dive into reality capture for energy development, construction, and operations, interviewing leading customers on the tools delivering ROI within their workflows. Those customer conversations led us to DroneDeploy, a hardware-agnostic software platform for autonomous drone control, reality capture, and analytics. In 2018, we met co-founders Mike Winn, Nicholas Pilkington, and Jono Millin, and were immediately impressed with their combination of management, technical, and SaaS expertise. Their product already represented the most cutting-edge and scalable solution on the market and was quickly growing across the construction sector. For them, artificial intelligence was never hype; their machine learning infrastructure dates back to the company's 2013 inception, and they were building out AI workflows as early as 2018. When we invested in their $25 million Series C, the company touted 30,000 users across 400,000 job sites - they were the de facto leaders in the space.

Their dominance hasn't flagged. Today, DroneDeploy has been used on over 3 million sites, surpassing 20 trillion square feet of real-world visual site data, which is the largest visual data set in the construction industry. They've stayed tenacious in product development, leveraging their data moat to build out four AI agents (Progress AI, Safety AI, Inspection AI, and Embodied AI), and expand their platform beyond drone surveys to autonomous robotics and ground-level 360 walks. Their robotics offerings alone have grown 160% YoY in 2026, and their customer base has expanded to include over 300 active data centers on their platform. More than 10 million flights later, DroneDeploy is still growing.

An Eight-Year Partnership

Since we led the company's Series C, Juan Muldoon, Katie McClain and I have all remained closely involved in the business, providing hands-on product feedback, specialist guidance, and financial support through their Series D and E.

We helped the team expand beyond construction to capture the growing opportunity in energy, power, and utilities, and leveraged our Energize network to introduce them to customers that are now pillars within their portfolio. And our friendship with CEO Mike Winn has continued to grow; he remains a thought partner to us and to our LPs on the evolving AI landscape, and a wise collaborator with the rest of our portfolio.

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DroneDeploy's Next Chapter

Procore is a natural home for DroneDeploy, and the deal represents a strong synergy of a world-class construction technology platform and the number one player in reality capture. Today's construction workers use Procore's platform to collaborate, analyze and plan across sites, driving efficiency and mitigating risk through AI and data-driven insights and decision-making. With DroneDeploy, Procore expands its on-site capture capabilities to provide information and observations to users. The deal accelerates Procore's AI strategy to deliver digital coworkers that can capture, analyze, and drive action across projects.

Procore's rich data set (including 400 million photos, 126 million drawings, and 10 million RFIs, submittals, and inspection in 2025 alone) combines with DroneDeploy's visual library to create a truly differentiated and mission-critical intelligence platform for their customers. The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of required regulatory approvals.

The Market Signal

We're proud to celebrate this moment both as an opportunity to return capital to our limited partners and as a vote of confidence for our space. This deal marks Energize's fourth exit in the past 12 months and third exit to a strategic acquirer, and we've seen firsthand that large strategics are actively seeking exposure to scaled digital platforms serving the energy and industrial markets. As in 2017, we believe the opportunity for the digital solutions in critical industries is massive; today's announcement proves that others are seeing it too. Congratulations to Mike and the entire team at DroneDeploy on this exciting chapter. Here's to what's next.