Craig “Tooey” Courtemanche, founder, president and CEO of tech firm Procore plans to become company executive chairman when his C-suite successor is named. In that new role, he said he will continue to be involved in the business and lead the company’s board of directors.

Procore said Courtemanche will remain as CEO and president until a new CEO is identified and hired by the board, a process he will take an active part in. Neither he nor the company disclosed an estimated timeframe for the search.

“We’ve built an incredible foundation, and I’ve decided that now is the right time to begin the process of searching for our next CEO who will build on our momentum and lead Procore through its next phase of growth,” said Courtemanche, who founded the firm 23 years ago—initially exchanging free WiFi internet connectivity to contractors on jobsites so they would use early versions of the company’s software-as-a-service construction management platform. 

In ensuing years, Courtemanche and his leadership team built Procore into a $9.78-billion publicly traded company with more than 2 million customers in about 150 nations.

Courtemanche, nicknamd “Tooey” because he shared the same first name as his father, founded Procore in 2002 after seeing how disconnected the construction process could be on a family building project. He developed the first versions of what would become Procore’s construction management platform to allow users to see all the critical path activities in a single platform. 

Trading software purchases for jobsite WiFi was an early sales technique that helped connect it in with the contracting community the Santa Barbara, Calif., area. Procore is now based in nearby Carpinteria, Calif., and has 4,203 employees. The company went public in 2022. 

“I founded Procore to solve the construction industry’s greatest challenges, and will continue to carry out my life’s work in my role today and in my next role,” he said in a company blog announcing the move.

In a 2022 ENR interview, Courtemanche said Procore’s sense of openness and interoperability would remain one of its core values and credited its commitment to open standards to rapid firm growth.

“It doesn’t matter about isolating data and holding things to ourselves. I think the more open we can be, the more the industry benefits and the more Procore ultimately benefits,” he said. 

Graham Smith, Procore’s lead independent director said in a statement that as the company searches for its next CEO, “our priority is to identify a leader with a strong commitment to our mission of connecting everyone in construction on a global platform and proven operational experience at scale–a leader who can continue to enhance customer value and drive extraordinary growth.”

In February, Procore reported its fourth quarter 2024 revenue at $302 million, a 16% year-over-year increase. The company announced it was releasing new artificial intelligence agents at its annual Groundbreak conference back in October.