
Depending on where you look, the average profit margins in construction are reported as being anywhere from 3% to 6%. Compared to other industries—many of which saw net margins over 20% in 2025—this would be considered low. Another way to put it, as Steelbeam Founder and CEO Noah Reneau did in his winning pitch for BuiltWorlds’ 2025 FinTech Conference Demo Day Competition, would be to say that “margins in construction suck.”
Still, despite our industry’s low margins, as Reneau went on to point out, companies persist with their missions to build. Why? “(Because) the built environment must be built.”
It’s a sad truth for our industry, but one Reneau believes not to be a foregone conclusion. Rather, he sees our industry’s historically low returns as the compounded result of widespread reliance on antiquated financial systems and processes that waste effort and catalyze errors.
“Our industry has a reliance on decades old ERP systems,” said Reneau, explaining how companies often employ custom spreadsheets to supplement functionality. “This massive input time plus the reliance on error-prone processes leads to an industry average cost overrun of 32.5% … on the average construction project.”
Steelbeam as a Margin Multiplier
Steelbeam is Reneau’s proposed solution.
The technology effectively works as an analysis engine, integrating into existing financial systems through which it automatically extracts, organizes, and verifies data pertinent to financial planning and forecasting. Through it, he aims to improve the industry’s average margin across the board by one percentage point—which would amount to millions of dollars in savings.

“It’s sleek (and) streamlined, yet familiar,” said Reneau, describing the platform’s forecasting page. “This is where … you’re shown every dollar and cent that has been accrued on your project, cost code by cost code; and where you can see your projected profit and any over under that’s in place.”
Citing one of Steelbeam’s early adopters, Harkins Builders, a preconstruction and construction management firm that’s been operating out of Columbia, Md since the ‘60s, Reneau explained how the company has already seen a “major leap in efficiency” as a direct result of the platform—”where before,” he added, “they were creating custom spreadsheets for each and every one of their projects, having their managers manually extract data from their system and dump it back into the spreadsheet just to start forecasting.”
An Ambitious Future
While the company remains in its early stages, having only been founded last year, Reneau, who boasts a background as a Washington State University offensive lineman playing under Hall of Fame head coach Mike Leach, is not shy about his ambitions for the technology.
“There are 900,000 active contractors in the US,” he said, noting that the 70,000 of those which are non-residential contractors will all be targets. “This creates a $1.2 billion opportunity for Steelbeam alone.”
Click Here to Watch the Full Pitch
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