The construction major Causeway appoints Richard Longdon, the long-serving CEO of FTSE 250 tech company AVEVA, as non-executive chairman. Longdon has more than three decades at the Cambridge-headquartered company  17 of those as CEO  before stepping down in 2017.

Longdon’s appointment at Causeway follows a recent £120m investment in the company by Five Arrows Principal Investments, the European corporate private equity arm of Rothschild & Co.

Phil Brown, CEO of Causeway, states that the appointment would help the company “scale our capability” in meeting its goal of digitizing the construction industry.

Causeway provides a range of software tools to the construction and infrastructure maintenance industries spanning planning, construction, maintenance and trade.

For example, Causeway’s biometric labour management platform centralises all relevant data – attendance, payroll, labour tracking, health & safety and so on – on the cloud. A biometric tablet provides contractors with security options that include facial recognition and fingerprint sensors.

Longdon’s experience comes from decades at AVEVA, a provider of industrial software with 20,000 customers worldwide that seeks to drive digital transformation and sustainability in its users “by connecting the power of information and artificial intelligence with human insight”.

Since leaving the company, he has taken on several non-executive roles, including as chairman of the rapidly growing software company Ideagen.

Brown says, “Richard’s addition to our board brings complimentary expertise in software business management and financial performance. This appointment is also indicative of the level of excitement about our market opportunity, and the strength of our ambitions as a business.

He continues, “Our core purpose at Causeway is to enable the digitisation of the construction industry to best-in-class standards, and Richard’s arrival will help us scale our capability so that we can enable our customers to best leverage technology to be distinctly impactful in their respective markets.”

Longdon adds, “This is a very important time for Causeway. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to work with Phil and his team as well as Five Arrows  together we will accelerate the extension of Causeway’s cloud platform across multiple sub-segments of the construction supply chain.

“It is clear that the construction industry urgently needs and wants good technology solutions. With its recent acquisitions and the investment from Five Arrows, I see Causeway as exceptionally well placed to play a leading role in this market, especially given Causeway’s fantastic product set and deep customer relationships.”