By Insandy (Empowered by AI)
For a hundred years, Nebraska’s greatest export has been competence.
From irrigation pivots to hydro dams, from Kiewit’s data-driven construction to HDR’s digital twins to center pivot innovation tapping the Ogallala aquifer, the state has built its reputation on engineering that works.
Now that same discipline has found a new material to build with: software.
The next great Nebraska construction project isn’t a bridge or a power plant — it’s a digital platform. And leading that transformation are two companies that grew up in the trades, speak the language of builders, and are quietly rewriting the rules of global construction: Buildertrend and CompanyCam.
Buildertrend — From Blueprints to Browser Tabs
When Dan Houghton, Steve Dugger, and Jeff Dugger founded Buildertrend in Omaha in 2006, they weren’t chasing the startup gold rush. They were solving the problem every builder knows: chaos.
Schedules scribbled on clipboards.
Estimates on sticky notes.
Change orders buried in email threads.
Their idea was deceptively simple — create a single, cloud-based workspace where builders, clients, and subcontractors could see the same truth in real time.
That idea grew into the world’s leading residential construction-management platform, now used by more than a million professionals across 100 countries.
Building a Digital Infrastructure
Buildertrend’s software does what Kiewit’s project-control systems have done for decades — only now it fits in your pocket.
It tracks every dollar, every hour, every milestone.
It ties budgets to blueprints and invoices to inspections.
It turns what was once gut instinct into data-backed decision-making.
A veteran superintendent at a Midwest homebuilder put it this way:
“Buildertrend took what we learned from the field trailer and put it in the cloud. It’s the Kiewit mindset for the rest of us.”
Scaling Without Spectacle
In 2021, Bain Capital Tech Opportunities invested strategically in Buildertrend, helping it expand globally while keeping its headquarters — and its cultural backbone — in Omaha. Hundreds of employees now work there, many of them the children and grandchildren of people who poured concrete or ran rebar before them.
They still talk like builders. They still think in terms of precision, sequence, and verification.The only thing that changed is the medium.
Where their grandparents built with rebar and reams of paper, they build with APIs and audit logs. The mindset is identical: measure twice, execute once.
In theory, Autodesk, Procore, or Oracle Primavera should dominate Buildertrend’s territory. Autodesk owns the BIM design layer; Procore serves large commercial GCs; Oracle built the ERP and scheduling tools for mega-projects. But those systems are heavy, expensive, and assume full-time IT teams. Buildertrend found the gap — small to midsize builders who don’t model buildings in Revit or run SAP, but still need to estimate, schedule, manage clients, and process payments. It’s not a BIM platform because its users don’t design in 3D; it’s not ERP because they don’t have accountants coding cost centers. It’s construction operations software — the digital clipboard for the real jobsite, built for speed, not hierarchy.
Dan Houghton, Buildertrend co-founder:
“Every feature we build comes from a jobsite conversation. The only difference now is that the jobsite is global.”
It’s why Omaha, not San Francisco, became the global capital of construction software.
📸 CompanyCam — Vision Is Verification
If Buildertrend is the digital command center, CompanyCam is the eye on the jobsite.
Founder Luke Hansen spent years running a family roofing business in Lincoln.
Every job meant a flood of photos — some on phones, some lost in texts, others mislabeled forever.He realized that every project’s history was being lost because no one could see it.
In 2015, Hansen launched CompanyCam to fix that problem. The app automatically tags every photo with time, GPS, and project data, uploads it to the cloud, and organizes it for instant access. No more confusion, no more “he-said, she-said” over what happened onsite.
Turning Pictures into Proof
CompanyCam didn’t just digitize photography; it turned it into field intelligence.
Crews can mark up images, assign tasks, and share progress with clients or insurers in seconds. Those annotated images become a living record — the “as-built” diary of the project.
Again, Procore Photos, Dropbox, or even Google Drive should have owned CompanyCam’s niche. Each already stored jobsite images; they just didn’t understand the jobsite. None of them linked photos to location, time, and project context in a way that construction crews actually needed. CompanyCam won because it treated images not as files but as field evidence – visual data with accountability built in. It stripped out the complexity, made uploads automatic, and organized everything around how foremen think: project first, proof second. Where competitors built generic storage, CompanyCam built situational awareness, turning the smartphone camera into a core construction tool instead of an afterthought.
Luke Hansen, CompanyCam founder:
“We’re not tech guys who found construction — we’re construction guys who learned tech. That’s Nebraska in a sentence.”
Companies like Beehive Industries and Layer, both Lincoln startups, also filled these types of situational awareness niches. But, neither has seen the success of CompanyCam.Nebraska’s software companies are rising behind the same philosophy Kiewit applies on billion-dollar jobs: document everything, because documentation is truth.
When CompanyCam raised a $30 million Series B from Blueprint Equity in 2021, it didn’t move to the coasts. It doubled down in Lincoln — a conscious decision to stay close to the trades that inspired it.
Today, hundreds of thousands of users rely on CompanyCam every day, from roofing crews in Australia to remodeling firms in Canada.
A New Kind of Field Instrument
Where HDR uses drones to map infrastructure and Kiewit builds digital twins of bridge decks, CompanyCam gives the same precision to a two-person crew.
It’s the democratization of documentation — the same Nebraska pragmatism scaled to every smartphone.
⚙️ Two Companies, One Legacy
Together, Buildertrend and CompanyCam form the digital infrastructure of modern construction.
| Layer | Company | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| Operations & Finance | Buildertrend | Bidding, budgeting, scheduling, client management |
| Field Verification | CompanyCam | Photo documentation, reporting, and real-time collaboration |
They are the direct descendants of Nebraska’s engineering lineage: Kiewit’s control, HDR’s modeling, and Valmont’s mechanization. Both companies grew by making complexity visible and controllable — the same lesson learned building Hoover Dam, irrigating the Plains, or wiring a nuclear command center at Offutt AFB.
Where their predecessors shaped concrete and steel, they shape information.
The Next Generation Rising
Nebraska’s digital ecosystem is now sprouting the next wave of builders-turned-founders, each carrying that same genetic code.
Layer (Lincoln) — The Model That Remembers
Born inside an architecture firm, Layer links Revit models to real-world field data, letting teams attach notes, photos, and checklists directly to building components.
It bridges the infamous “handoff gap” between design and operations — the software version of HDR’s digital delivery.
Eserv (Omaha) — The Contractor’s Back Office, Automated
Eserv is building simple, field-tested tools for estimating, invoicing, and crew scheduling — giving small contractors enterprise-grade visibility.
It’s what Buildertrend was fifteen years ago: pragmatic software born from pain points, not pitch decks.
Build Mas (Omaha) — Building the Workforce That Builds Everything Else
By connecting Latino tradespeople to verified jobs, training, and financial resources, Build Mas turns workforce tech into social infrastructure.
It’s innovation as inclusion — a distinctly Nebraskan form of progress.
Drone Amplified (Lincoln) — Firefighting from the Sky
Born out of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s wildfire research program, Drone Amplified builds drone-based ignition and monitoring systems that help firefighters conduct safer, more precise controlled burns. Its flagship product, IGNIS, mounts on commercial drones to drop ignition spheres that start backfires and eliminate fuel before wildfires spread. Used by the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and international fire agencies, it replaces helicopters with automated, GPS-guided precision — reducing risk, cost, and emissions. Drone Amplified represents another form of Nebraska’s engineering ethos: turning field problems into reliable, field-tested tools that make dangerous work more human and data-driven.
Dozens more startups, many seeded by Invest Nebraska, MOVE VC, the Nebraska Angels, AND state prototype grants, are tackling everything from drone surveying to materials tracking. They’re the descendants of Kiewit’s engineers and Valmont’s machinists – carrying the family trade into the cloud.
The Continuum of Construction Intelligence
Every era of Nebraska innovation solved the same problem: how to make the physical world more predictable.
| Era | Medium | Nebraska Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| 1930s–50s | Steel & Concrete | Kiewit standardizes project controls |
| 1960s–80s | Water & Energy | Valmont mechanizes irrigation; Tenaska stabilizes power |
| 1990s–2010s | Data & Design | HDR perfects digital delivery |
| 2020s–Future | Code & Collaboration | Buildertrend and CompanyCam digitize construction practice |
This isn’t a shift — it’s a continuum.
Each generation inherits a problem, abstracts it into data, and engineers a better solution. That’s what innovation looks like when it’s grounded in responsibility instead of hype.
In the End
Buildertrend and CompanyCam aren’t departures from Nebraska’s past.
They’re its digital continuation — proof that the same land that learned to manage water and power can just as easily manage data.
The Cornhusker State built the world’s infrastructure once.
Now it’s building the software that runs it.
