PlanGrid: iPhones and iPads on a construction site

A lot of contractors are turning their crew’s iPhones and iPads into a blueprint viewer.

PlanGrid, a tech company from San Francisco with an app of the same name, has come up with the idea of stocking all the blueprints relating to a large project on a cloud-based server so everybody working on the project can view and share drawings, modifications, annotations, latest notifications and screenshots of the site.

Engineers and workers can instantly see the latest changes or issues and address the problem which they can then publish and distribute to the whole crew around the job site on the spot. PlanGrid also protects your data through an AES-256 bit end-to-end encryption.

The app is free but you pay for the cloud service. Their most popular plan offers a 5,000 sheets for $ 59 a month per user, when billed annually.

In a nutshell, PlanGrid puts all your document in their platform and then when you hit publish, it appears on everyone’s mobile devices in the field ready for viewing and editing. It’s the software that your foremen will actually use.

PlanGrid now boasts tens of thousand of contractors and has just landed a $ 40 million investment. Their cloud-based platform has been used on more than 450,000 construction projects and it has proven wrong those who had said: "There’s no way construction field workers would ever use software, they don’t need it. There’s no way they’re going to be able to hold an iPad and not break it."