Procore Technologies Inc. officially launched its Procore Pay service on its construction project management platform Sept. 19, following a lengthy testing period. The launch coincided with Procore’s Groundbreak conference held in Chicago, where the company announced a slate of other new and planned services.

Procore Pay integrates with the company’s existing invoicing tool to allow general contractors to streamline the process of paying subcontractors and to automate lien waiver management. Rather than having to log in to Procore to get information and then move it into their accounting system, contractors can see it all in one place, explains Geoff Lewis, vice president of product management for Procore. The service is currently available to U.S.-based contractors who use Procore Invoice Management, and the company plans to expand it to a broader set of customers next year.

The construction technology company announced Procore Pay at last year's Groundbreak following a deal with Goldman Sachs to provide support for the service. Procore Pay sets up contractors with transaction banking accounts to manage payments.

Procore ran a free pilot program for the service with about two-dozen general contractors earlier this year. Tiffanie Artigas, director of operational excellence at West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Verdex Construction, says the $400-million contractor typically processes between 800 and 1,000 checks per month. As the company grew, its payment process was slowing down and becoming more resource-heavy, she says, and some checks have even gone out before lien waivers were in hand.

Verdex participated in the Procore Pay pilot, and Artigas estimates Pay will save the company $90,000 per year in staff time that would have otherwise been spent hunting down items like lien waivers and executive signatures for checks, plus $18,000 per year it had been paying for lien waiver generation software it will no longer need. Now, its compliance process all happens within Procore via a checklist, and subcontractors are able to see the status of their payments and receive notification when an invoice is paid. Procore will not release payments to subcontractors until the signed lien waiver is submitted to the platform, but also will not release the waiver to general contractors until the payment is submitted. Artigas says the money is reaching subs’ accounts by the morning after they submit payments.

“We are just thrilled with this solution,” she says.

In the future, Procore aims to include suppliers in Pay by adding lien waiver management for sub tiers, Lewis says. Lien waiver management is already available through Procore's 2021 acquisition LevelSet, whose technology underpins much of Procore Pay.

Procore Acquires GIS Platform Unearth

Wyatt Jenkins, chief product officer at Procore, announced the company acquired geospatial information mapping technology company Unearth Labs. Procore did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but a spokesperson says the acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on its 2023 financial results.

Unearth already has a Procore integration, which allows project team members to upload photos and documents and associate those files with a point on a map of the project. Jenkins says Procore plans to integrate Unearth across its platform, starting with project execution. 

“Imagine working on a 14-mile highway project,” he says. “You’ve got thousands of photos. An issue arises, and you’ve got to find that needle in a haystack to get crews back on site. Procore will allow you to locate that in seconds, visually.”

AI-based Assistant in Development

Procore CEO Tooey Courtemanche also shared plans for a new conversational and predictive artificial intelligence assistant called Copilot. While still under development, he says Procore plans to launch Copilot next year. It would be able to search through contracts and other project documents to quickly answer a team member’s questions. Procore is also working with Microsoft to extend Copilot with its Azure AI into Microsoft products. 

Procore also plans to build other offerings into Copilot, allowing it to flag safety trends in daily reports, optimize schedules and draft documents like change orders, according to Courtemanche.

“The days of sifting through a massive amount of data, trying to find actual insight, will be in the past,” he says. “This Copilot is going to be working alongside you and in the background to flag the most important information so you and your team become much more productive.”

Procore is also beta-testing an AI-powered location tool that would extract data from drawings, according to Jenkins. Using Unearth’s GIS technology, Procore plans to have its AI automatically populate drawings with data from RFIs, photos and other documents.

“We have a ton of data,” Courtemanche says. “We want you to be able to type into our search bar anything that you want to know about.”