Trayd Secures $10M to Overhaul Construction's Back Office

NEW YORK, NY – March 25, 2026 – Trayd, a software company building a back-office operating system for specialty trade contractors, has announced a $10 million Series A funding round. The investment, led by White Star Capital, aims to accelerate product development and national expansion for the platform, which has already demonstrated productivity gains of over 30-fold for its customers.

The funding round brings Trayd’s total capital raised to $15 million and includes follow-on investments from early backers Suffolk Technologies and Y Combinator. It also introduces a new strategic investment from RXR, the prominent New York-based real estate and technology investment firm. This infusion of capital validates Trayd's mission to modernize a critical but historically underserved segment of the $2 trillion U.S. construction industry.

"Specialty contractors represent the backbone of a massive construction industry, yet they have been historically overlooked by technological innovation," said Eddie Lee, General Partner at White Star Capital. "Anna and Cara bring a rare, powerful combination of deep industry empathy and elite engineering expertise. We led this round because Trayd isn't just solving a massive payroll headache; they are building the definitive end-to-end operating system for the trades."

A Market Ripe for Disruption

While the construction industry is vast, technology has often focused on the needs of general contractors (GCs). However, specialty trade contractors—the electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, and masons who perform the bulk of the physical work—outnumber GCs by a staggering 400 to 1. This massive segment has long grappled with generic software that fails to address the unique complexities of their operations.

Trayd was founded in 2021 to fill this gap. Its all-in-one platform is purpose-built to handle the intricate web of payroll, HR, scheduling, and field tracking required by the trades. This includes automating wage calculations that vary by trade, project type (state, federal, or private), multi-state tax laws, and complex union rules.

"I grew up watching contractors spend hours every week trying to make payroll systems fit the realities of their jobs," said Anna Berger, co-founder and CEO of Trayd. "Specialty trade contractors deploy the majority of the workforce that builds our cities, yet the software that supports that labor has lagged for decades. We're building the infrastructure that finally matches the complexity of how construction actually works."

Since its founding, the company has seen rapid adoption, achieving 600% year-over-year revenue growth and quadrupling its team size from six to 24 employees.

From 14 Hours to 27 Minutes

The core of Trayd’s value proposition lies in its dramatic efficiency gains. The company reports that its platform reduces the average weekly payroll processing time from a staggering 14 hours down to just 27 minutes. This frees up nearly two full days of administrative labor each week, allowing contractors to focus on managing growth and deploying their workforce effectively.

Customers attest to this transformative impact. "Before Trayd, we spent up to 12 hours a week just fixing timesheets, with manual errors happening roughly 17% of the time," said Nate Lewis, Owner of United General Contractors. His Field Operations Manager, Archie Goldsmith, added that Trayd "consolidated three different platforms into one, allowing us to manage 300% growth in our field staff with absolutely no additional administrative costs and no added headaches."

This consolidation is key. Many contractors are forced to create what Berger calls a "Frankensteined back office," stitching together multiple, disparate software tools for time tracking, payroll, and compliance. Trayd aims to replace this patchwork with a single, integrated system, providing a unified source of truth for all back-office operations.

Navigating a Tightening Regulatory Maze

The new funding arrives at a critical moment for the construction industry, which is facing increased economic and regulatory pressures. In late 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor implemented the first comprehensive updates to the Davis-Bacon Act in nearly 40 years. These changes introduced stricter compliance obligations for contractors working on federally funded projects.

The new rules restored the "30 percent rule" for determining prevailing wages, which is expected to raise wage rates. They also expanded recordkeeping requirements, mandating that contractors maintain detailed payroll records, including worker classifications and hours worked, for at least three years. Crucially, the updates place direct legal responsibility for compliance on contractors, increasing their risk of financial penalties and project disqualification for errors.

Trayd is positioned as an essential tool for navigating this complex landscape. The platform automates the calculation of prevailing wages and other complex pay structures, ensuring accuracy and generating the necessary compliance reports.

“The construction industry depends on financially strong, operationally sound trade partners to deliver projects successfully,” said Diana Kay, Partner at Suffolk Technologies. “Payroll is the core workflow that keeps these businesses running, and one of the hardest to get right. By modernizing payroll, Trayd is unlocking meaningful productivity gains and building the foundation for more efficient, resilient, and transparent operations across the industry."

Empathy Meets Engineering

The driving force behind Trayd is the unique partnership of its co-founders. CEO Anna Berger brings a lifetime of industry empathy, having grown up in a construction family and witnessed the operational pain points firsthand. This personal connection is paired with the technical prowess of CTO Cara Kessler, who spent a decade as a web platform lead at LinkedIn.

"Construction payroll is one of the most technically complex environments that exists; union rules, prevailing wages, tax jurisdictions, and project-level compliance requirements break traditional payroll software," explained Kessler. "We're bringing modern engineering discipline to a system that historically relied on spreadsheets and manual work."

This blend of insider knowledge and elite engineering has allowed Trayd to build a platform that is both powerful and user-friendly. The founders' vision extends beyond payroll automation. They aim to address the industry's persistent labor shortage by offering tools like instant access to earned wages, improving the financial wellness of workers who have been traditionally overlooked by modern fintech solutions.

With its new capital, Trayd plans to pursue national expansion and continue enhancing its platform, which already integrates with all major accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. By solving the most complicated back-office problem first, the company is laying a robust foundation to become the definitive operating system for the trades, shaping a more efficient and transparent future for the entire construction ecosystem.