The biggest industry in the market isn't software. It's construction.

Ask a strategy consultant to name the biggest industry in the Western market and you will hear "software", "healthcare", maybe "business services". The correct answer is the one nobody says: construction. With 80,635 companies in Europe and 80,465 in the US, 161,100 in the $1M to $300M+ range under the narrow industry label alone, 309,468 counting the full construction & real-estate sector, it is the single largest industry on both continents. It is also the least covered, least digitised and most family-owned major market we track.

Three numbers that define the opportunity

• $289k revenue per employee. The median construction firm out-earns the median technology company ($198k) per head, asset intensity, not inefficiency, but it means these are real businesses with real budgets, not lifestyle operations.
• 13,230 website visits a year. The sector's median digital footprint is among the weakest we measure, a $30M contractor typically runs a website smaller than a neighbourhood restaurant's. Whoever sells digitisation into this sector is selling into greenfield.
• 58,314 family-owned firms against just 4,461 PE-backed ones in construction & real estate. The succession pipeline here is the deepest of any sector, and the least brokered.

Why the coverage gap exists

Construction is fragmented (no dominant logos to anchor coverage), local (few cross-border champions), and boring (no product launches, no keynotes). Analysts follow attention; attention follows venture capital; venture capital avoids project-based revenue. The result is a systematic blind spot over the largest pool of companies in the West.

For buyers of data, blind spots are the product. A construction-tech vendor, a building-products manufacturer, an insurer or a search fund working this sector competes against far fewer well-armed rivals than anyone selling into SaaS.