- Ron Antevy received his civil engineering degree from the University of Florida in 1991.
- He joined his brother’s fledgling construction software company, e-Builder in 1998
- The multi-million-dollar company has since been acquired by Trimble, Inc.
Call it fate or timing or maybe rolling the dice, but when Ron Antevy (BSCE ’91) decided to quit his stable job to join his brother’s struggling startup company, his life changed forever. And for the better.
Seven years after receiving his civil engineering degree from the University of Florida, Antevy made “the greatest decision” of his life in 1998, joining the company that would ultimately become e-Builder, an innovative information-sharing and management platform for the construction industry.
E-Builder was ultimately acquired by Trimble Inc., a global geomatics, construction and logistics company, for $500 million. Trimble incorporated and built upon the ground-breaking work begun by brothers Ron and Jon Antevy, becoming a global construction technology powerhouse.
As a recently crowned 2026 University of Florida Distinguished Alumni, Antevy returned to his beloved Gator Nation. As the spring commencement speaker for the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, he shared his journey from civil engineering graduate to successful entrepreneur with a few thousand of his colleagues.
Antevy is certainly one of the great success stories to come out of UF Engineering. He is a diehard Gator who sits on the college’s Dean’s Advisory Board. But, he will tell you, his success was not assured when he first walked that commencement stage 35 years ago.
Prior to graduating, Antevy did what many UF students do: Attend a career fair. After a few interviews, he accepted an offer from Waste Management Inc., a company founded by serial entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga (AutoNation, Blockbuster Video, Miami Dolphins).
Antevy’s Waste Management role certainly called on his civil engineering education, but he increasingly found himself drawn to the business side of the company. After a few years, he was immersed in financial operations and happily so.
Meanwhile, Antevy’s younger brother, Jon, also a UF graduate (BDES ’93, MSBC ’94), was working hard to turn his master’s thesis into a viable company. Hoping to leverage new technology at the time — the internet — Jon Antevy dreamed of revolutionizing the construction industry with a product that could share plans and streamline project management.
The need was there. The construction industry was inherently wasteful and inefficient, Ron Antevy contends.
“Construction is a lot like manufacturing except you only build one individual product,” he said. “Imagine building an entire manufacturing plant just to make one pair of shoes. And then closing the plant and firing everyone. It’s like that.”
In 1998, e-Builder was struggling. Potential clients were hampered by inconsistent access to internet connections at job sites. At the same time, Antevy was ready for a change. Finding himself recently divorced with few external obligations, he longed to rejoin his brother in the world of work.
As boys, the two worked for their grandfather, and as UF students, they often discussed starting a construction company together.
“I got divorced in 1997, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna quit my job, sell my house, and I’m finally going to do this with him.’ I came up to Gainesville, and we became partners, and we just started from there,” Antevy recalled.
The combination of Jon’s creativity and vision with Ron’s business know-how and managerial skills proved to be the secret sauce.
E-Builder initially targeted general contractors, providing a cloud-based platform for sharing information amongst contractors and subcontractors.
Over time, the product “adapted and meandered,” according to Antevy, morphing into a robust platform for project management. E-Builder provided intuitive, useful dashboard views for single projects or an entire capital program, looking across all projects to make sense of budgeting, costs and workflows.
Running a construction-management software company may seem a long way from civil engineering, but Antevy said his time at UF had a profound impact.
“I may do very little actual engineering nowadays, but what I learned at UF still affects me to this day,” he said. “I believe that an engineering degree teaches you a way of thinking more than anything else. The critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills gave me a framework for the way my brain works. People make fun of me, you know — the ‘engineering mentality’ or whatever, but it’s served me so well in business and in my life.”
Another byproduct of his civil engineering degree? Client credibility.
“At e-Builder, if we were to take a sampling of our clients, 80% of the direct decision makers are all civil engineers,” Antevy remarked. “So, it gave me credibility. I’m not just a sales guy to them, I’m an engineer.”
Additionally, in the early days of the company, Antevy was heavily involved in the product design and found himself drawing upon his “civil days.”
Antevy now spends most of his time working with his investment business, Antevy Capital, working with startups and growing software businesses. Doubtlessly, the memories of e-Builder’s beginnings inform his current work with budding entrepreneurs.
Those early days are never far from his mind.
“At any other point of my life, I would never have had the courage to make that leap,” he recalled. “Too much risk. But I ended up moving to Gainesville, I met my wife, married almost 25 years and we have a beautiful family, so it all worked out really well. That one little moment was maybe the greatest decision of my life.”
Such success brings much pride to UF’s civil engineering, noted Interim Director of ESSIE Kurt Gurley, Ph.D.
“What I most admired was his humility,” Gurley recalled about meeting Antevy at the commencement. “He had earned the right to crow about his success, and he refused. Instead, he talked about his failures, shared his vulnerability and connected through our common humanity to inspire this graduating class. Antevy reminds me that I’m not too old to learn by example.”