There&#x27;s been lots of software to serve construction. PlanGrid is successful because:<p>1. It&#x27;s late enough to the game that it could start as a SaaS company.<p>2. It&#x27;s late enough to the market that it can leverage contemporary Silicon Valley financial tools.<p>3. Mobile computing is now ubiquitous enough that a mobile first strategy is viable for construction...PlanGrid&#x27;s creation story is based on the introduction of the iPad.<p>4. PlanGrid has a low first cost (as in free tier) pricing model that allows initial use by construction company employees without incurring a cost against the budget of the projects to which they are assigned.<p>5. The product was introduced to solve a narrow problem rather than sold a by four legged meat eating sales team as an office suite.<p>That said, successfully scaling out to a general solution is a different challenge because the number of moving parts increases and the edge cases that can cost a construction company enough money to put them under are exponentially larger. There&#x27;s a hard copy fallback for drawings at the building department and another at the architect&#x27;s office and various other copies living out in the wild at the architect&#x27;s consultants and the contractor&#x27;s subcontractors. That&#x27;s not the case with a contractor&#x27;s internal documentation.<p>To put it another way, there&#x27;s a certain tolerable error level to a PlanGrid generated link from a floor plan to a detail because it can verified against the originals and the actual building. The acceptable error level is different when the electronic version is the original and there&#x27;s no external validation mechanism.<p>Then again, $40 million is a lot of money to deploy against such challenges.