By Eddie Lee, General Partner, and Ted Vinnitchouk, Analyst
TLDR: White Star Capital is proud to lead Trayd’s $10 million Series A to build the back-office operating system that trade contractors have needed for decades.
America depends on the trades. So why are the trades still stuck with software built before the dot-com bubble?
Construction is a $2 trillion-plus industry, yet much of its core operations still run on paper timesheets, disconnected systems, and manual work. The result is a back office that can become a nightmare even for the largest construction companies.
Nowhere is that pain more severe than in payroll and labor management, which accounts for more than 70% of a trade contractor’s back-office costs as roughly $260 billion of wage payments flow through the industry every year.
In unionized commercial construction, the complexity multiplies. Wage rules vary by task and geography, workers can change classifications mid-shift, and a single payroll error can idle a jobsite the next morning. Payroll accuracy is not optional. It is non-negotiably critical.
However, despite the severity, there is still no scaled vertical-specific platform purpose-built for construction payroll and compliance.
Contractors are left stitching together separate tools for payroll, time tracking, HR, and project management, then reconciling the gaps manually through spreadsheets, emails, and paper forms. Core workflows such as certified payroll, union remittances, wage calculations, and classification changes often live outside the system entirely.
The result is a back office that breaks under the weight of the work. Fines, delays, compliance risk, and enormous administrative drag are common. Instead of taking on new projects and growing the business, contractors can spend up to 80 hours a week just keeping the back office running.
Enter, Trayd.
Starting with payroll, Trayd is rebuilding the construction back office from the ground up.
Today, the platform unifies time tracking, payroll, dispatch, and HR in one system that is tailor-made for trade contractors. Contractors can onboard workers, dispatch crews, capture hours from the field, and manage labor, all from one place.
Because Trayd has a complete view of workforce activity, it can automate the most complex parts of union payroll and compliance. The platform handles union calculations, applies the correct wage rates across trades and geographies, and generates certified payroll reports in a single click.
The payoff is massive. Contractors reduce compliance risk, gain real-time visibility into their workforce and the true labor cost of every job, and eliminate up to 80 hours of manual work so they can focus on what actually matters: growing the business.
For example, Titan Structural Group, one of Trayd’s earliest customers, was able to save 100 hours of administrative time while doubling the speed of compliance reporting as it scaled its business from three to 42 workers.
So, why did we invest?
From the first time we met CEO Anna Berger and CTO Cara Kessler, it was clear Trayd had an edge that could not be replicated. The market is large. The problem is painful. The timing is right. But what truly stood out was Anna and Cara’s customer obsession and deep-rooted passion for modernizing the trades.
Anna did not discover this market from the outside, she grew up in it. Coming from a multi-generational construction family, she understands contractors in a way no other founder can- how they work, what they value, and where software has historically failed them.
Cara, Anna’s childhood friend, brings the technical depth needed to build the infrastructure behind one of America’s largest industries. She was one of the youngest Senior Staff Engineers at LinkedIn, where she built large-scale systems that demanded the same precision, reliability, and performance that construction payroll requires.
In an industry like construction, where trust is everything and relationships drive every decision, no team is better positioned than Anna and Cara to bridge the gap between innovation and the jobsite.
What’s next?
Payroll has always been just one piece of the construction back-office puzzle.
As Trayd expands into adjacent workflows, it will eventually own the construction back office end-to-end, replacing fragmented tools with a single system of record.
That saves contractors time, but more importantly, it gives construction something it has never had: a clean centralized data layer across its workforce and operations.
This data foundation is what will make meaningful AI adoption possible in construction, helping contractors move beyond manual processes and legacy software toward a more predictable and AI-enabled future.
We’re thrilled to partner with such an impressive team alongside Suffolk Ventures, YC, and RXR. We look forward to supporting Anna and Cara as they continue to bring construction software into the 21st century.
For more information, and to have a look at what the team is building, check out Trayd’s website: https://www.buildtrayd.com/