Mike Winn, Nick Pilkington (@pilk36) and Jono Millin agreed to sell the reality-capture business they founded to Procore for approximately $845 million in cash, giving the construction software provider control of the cameras, drones and robots that collect data from its customers' jobsites.
Procore and DroneDeploy announced the definitive agreement on July 29th. The price remains subject to customary purchase-price adjustments, and the transaction is expected to close later in 2026 after regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Goldman Sachs is advising Procore, while Citi is advising DroneDeploy.
The transaction was recirculated on August 3rd in a post on X as a reported acquisition. Signed terms had been public for five days: the official announcement confirmed the cash price, deal structure and expected closing window.
DroneDeploy grew from an anti-poaching experiment into a data supplier for some of the world's largest construction projects. Winn, Pilkington and Millin grew up together in South Africa and began working in 2011 on a way for Kruger National Park rangers to operate drones without weeks of training or cumbersome computers. They moved to San Francisco and founded DroneDeploy in 2013 around a broader proposition: make commercial drones easy to control and move the resulting imagery into the cloud.
Winn previously worked in sales and engineering at Google after studying economics and applied mathematics at Rhodes University. Pilkington completed a machine-learning Ph.D. at Cambridge, while Millin pursued machine-learning research at the University of Edinburgh after earning a master's degree in artificial intelligence.
Procore is buying the perception layer
For Procore CEO Ajei Gopal, DroneDeploy fills a specific gap in an AI stack assembled through acquisitions. Procore already owns the system where contractors manage drawings, requests for information, inspections, schedules and other project records. DroneDeploy supplies a continuous record of what physically happened on the site. That distinction matters because construction records are often created manually and after the fact. A drawing shows what crews were supposed to build. A request for information documents a question. A daily log records someone's account of the work. DroneDeploy's drones, ground robots, mobile devices, 360-degree cameras and fixed cameras can capture the site itself, giving Procore's software another source against which to check those records.
Gopal said Procore intends to cross-sell DroneDeploy across Procore's customer base and sell Procore products to DroneDeploy customers after closing. The longer-term plan is to combine visual capture with software agents that identify an issue and initiate a workflow inside Procore.
Procore has been building the other pieces of that architecture throughout 2026. In January, Procore acquired Datagrid, an AI product that connects construction documents and data sources. By May, Procore had embedded Datagrid's multimodal index into agents that search drawings and specifications, review submittals, check requests for information and draft daily logs.
DroneDeploy adds the input layer. Datagrid helps software interpret documents already stored across construction systems. DroneDeploy can collect new evidence from the field before a worker enters it into a project-management application. Procore's intended sequence is capture, interpretation and action, all inside one vendor's platform.
The datasets are central to that strategy, though the figures are supplied by Procore and DroneDeploy. Procore says its systems handled nearly 400 million photos, more than 126 million drawings and over 10 million requests for information, submittals and inspections during the preceding year. DroneDeploy claims approximately 20 trillion square feet of visual data, tens of millions of user annotations and more than 100,000 labeled safety issues.
Those records could help Procore train and evaluate construction-specific models, where a generic vision system may struggle to distinguish routine progress from a sequencing error, safety risk or deviation from a drawing. The commercial value will depend on whether Procore can convert that data into reliable actions without creating false alarms for field crews.
The integration was already in production
Procore is acquiring a product that already moves data into its platform. The existing DroneDeploy-Procore integration exports aerial maps, panoramic images, photos and field notes into Procore, while pulling Procore drawings into DroneDeploy as georeferenced overlays.
DroneDeploy's July product release added two-way field-note synchronization, allowing an observation created during a site walk to move into Procore and a resolution entered there to flow back to DroneDeploy. DroneDeploy also released schedule matching for its Progress AI product and an early-access robotic capture service designed to collect interior imagery after crews leave a site.
That existing connection reduces one part of the integration risk. Procore does not need to prove that the two products can exchange basic project data. The harder work is combining permissions, data models, AI outputs and commercial packaging without disrupting customers that use DroneDeploy alongside other construction systems.
Procore is also paying to own a distribution path that previously sat outside its platform. DroneDeploy says its products have been used on more than 3 million sites in over 180 countries and have processed 2.8 billion images. Procore says more than 3 million projects have run on its software across over 150 countries. Those are vendor-reported usage figures rather than revenue or active-customer disclosures, but the overlap gives Gopal an immediate cross-selling pool.
DroneDeploy's investors get a cash exit
DroneDeploy had disclosed at least $157 million in funding before the acquisition agreement. A $50 million Series E in 2021, led by Energize Ventures and AirTree, brought its reported total at the time to $142 million. Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Emergence Capital, AngelPad, Uncork Capital and Frontline Ventures also backed DroneDeploy.
In September 2025, DroneDeploy announced another $15 million from existing investors including Emergence, Scale, AirTree, Bessemer and Uncork. DroneDeploy also said it had reached break-even, although DroneDeploy did not publish revenue, operating income or cash-flow figures supporting that claim.
The $845 million purchase price is about 5.4 times DroneDeploy's disclosed funding. That ratio does not describe investor returns because ownership, preferences, secondary sales and dilution remain private. It does show the strategic premium Procore assigned to the combination of field-capture software, robotics, customer distribution and construction-specific visual data.
The acquisition is also substantial relative to Procore's liquid resources earlier this year. As of March 31st, Procore reported $386 million in cash and cash equivalents and $205 million in marketable securities. The purchase price exceeds that combined amount by roughly $254 million.
Gopal took over as Procore's CEO in November 2025 after running engineering-simulation software provider Ansys through its $35 billion sale to Synopsys. Procore founder Craig "Tooey" Courtemanche Jr., who started Procore in 2002 after working in carpentry, real estate development and software, remains chairman.
The DroneDeploy agreement is Gopal's clearest capital-allocation decision since taking the job. Procore is spending $845 million to move beyond storing the construction record and control how that record is observed. The bet requires DroneDeploy's cameras and robots to produce evidence that Procore's AI can interpret accurately enough to change what happens on an active jobsite.