Former Head of Product for Specialty Contractors at the industry's largest construction tech platform joins BuildOps to lead product strategy for commercial trades
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESS Newswire / March 25, 2026 / BuildOps, the AI-native platform for commercial contractors, today announced the appointment of Will Lehrmann as Chief Product Officer. Lehrmann spent nearly 12 years at Procore Technologies, where he served as Vice President of Product Management and Head of Product for Specialty Contractors - the exact market segment BuildOps was built to serve. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President of Product at MaintainX.
The hire comes at a turning point for the trades. Commercial contractors have more work than they can staff - data center buildouts, hospital modernizations, aging infrastructure - but the software most of them rely on was designed to digitize paperwork, not to think. The next generation of technology for this industry won't just record what happened; it will anticipate what should happen next. BuildOps is building that product, and Lehrmann is the person they chose to lead it.
"Will built the product playbook for specialty contractors at the company that defined the category," said Alok Chanani, Co-Founder and CEO of BuildOps. "He knows this customer better than almost anyone in the industry. We're not hiring a product leader who needs to learn the trades - we're hiring one who's spent his entire career in them."
In his new role, Lehrmann will own BuildOps' full product vision and roadmap, extending the company's AI-native platform into full autonomous operations for the trades. At Procore, he built best-in-class tools for specialty contractors - but only for project management. BuildOps is the first platform to unify project management and service operations for commercial trades, and Lehrmann will lead the push to make that unified platform autonomous: technology that predicts, recommends, and executes work on a contractor's behalf. BuildOps calls it a system of action.
"I've spent my career building products for the people who keep our world running," said Will Lehrmann, Chief Product Officer of BuildOps. "BuildOps has something I haven't seen before: a platform built from the ground up specifically for commercial contractors, with the focus and the data to make AI actually work for them. That's the next frontier for this industry, and it's why I'm here."
The appointment follows a year in which BuildOps was named to Forbes' America's Best Startup Employers list for the fourth consecutive year. The company has also assembled an enterprise-caliber leadership bench, adding CRO Greg Gillis - who scaled Coupa Software from $300 million to over $1 billion in revenue - and CMO Colin Piper, formerly head of global marketing for Autodesk's construction technology division.
"The trades deserve AI that's built for them - not generic tools retrofitted from someone else's industry," Chanani added. "Will's job is to make sure every capability we ship understands how a contractor actually runs a business, from the dispatch board to the job site to the invoice."
BuildOps has raised over $225 million in funding, including a $127 million Series C led by Meritech Capital Partners that valued the company at $1 billion. The platform serves more than 1,000 commercial specialty contractors - including HVAC, plumbing, electrical, fire protection, and refrigeration businesses - across North America.
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About BuildOps
BuildOps is the AI-native platform for commercial contractors. Built for the complexity of large-scale commercial work, it unifies service, projects, and financials into one system powered by OpsAI - intelligence designed for real work in the trades - to help teams operate with clarity when the work is on the line. Today, more than 1,500 leading companies across North America trust BuildOps, backed by Founders Fund, N47, Meritech Capital, and other top investors. Learn more at https://buildops.com/
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SOURCE: BuildOps
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire:
https://www.accessnewswire.com/newsroom/en/computers-technology-and-internet/buildops-names-procore-veteran-will-lehrmann-as-chief-product-off-1150331
