Development and adoption of digital information tools in the construction sector provides fertile ground for the birth and growth of companies that specialize in applications of technologies to design and construction. While some of the technologies are themselves new, the majority are based on ideas that have proliferated in construction research for decades but could not be implemented without a sound digital building information foundation. Building Information Modelling (BIM) itself can be traced to a landmark paper from 1975; ideas for artificially intelligent design and code checking tools date from the mid-1980s; and construction robots have laboured in research labs for decades. Yet it is only within the past five years that venture capital has actively sought startup companies in the ‘Construction Tech’ sector. We follow a set of digital construction innovations through their known past and their uncertain present, and we review their increasingly optimistic future, all through the lens of their dependence on digital information. The review identifies new challenges, yielding a set of research topics with the potential to unlock a range of future applications that make extensive use of artificial intelligence.