Trayd, a startup that is building a back office operating system for the construction industry, has raised $10 million in Series A funding, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
White Star Capital led the company’s Series A, which was raised in just three weeks and included participation from repeat backers Y Combinator and Suffolk Technologies. The round also included an investment from new strategic backer RXR Realty, a real estate and technology investment firm. It brings New York-based Trayd’s total funding to $17 million.
Co-founder and CEO Anna Berger grew up in a New York construction family, watching her father navigate razor-thin margins and complex compliance requirements.
“I saw firsthand the operational strain that comes with juggling union rules, multistate labor laws, and endless manual back-office processes,” she recalls.
The experience inspired her to team up with Cara Kessler, the company’s CTO, who spent 10 years as LinkedIn’s web platform lead, to start Trayd in 2021.
Specialty trade service
For the unacquainted, specialty trade contractors are businesses that place skilled workers on job sites to perform the actual physical building work. These contractors include concrete crews, electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, painters and fireproofing. They’re distinct from general contractors, who manage and coordinate projects overall but don’t typically perform the hands-on trade work themselves.
Trayd automates payroll, HR, compliance and labor cost tracking for such contractors. Among the benefits it touts are providing real-time visibility into the costs of labor, equipment and materials.
The startup aims to substantially cut the time specialty trade contractors spend on its weekly payroll and compliance process.
“What used to take 14 hours of manual work can now be done in under 30 minutes,” Berger told Crunchbase News.
Trayd is working to fill what it believes is a unique gap in the market. While there are significantly more specialty trade contractors than general contractors, the majority of construction technology has been built for the latter, Berger believes.
The startup’s closest competitors are legacy payroll providers like ADP and Paychex, along with newer companies like Miter and Lumber.
“The difference is that most of these systems weren’t built for the complexity of specialty trades,” Berger explains. “Trayd was.”
Streamlining payroll
In construction, compensation is uniquely complex, Berger said. A single worker might earn four different pay rates in a single day depending on the specific trade task, the project scope and the jurisdiction.
“Generic” payroll platforms cannot handle this constant rate variability, contends Berger. For example, payroll admins might receive stacks of paper timesheets or phoned-in hours from various job sites. Then they have to manually key all of that field data into Excel spreadsheets and calculate the pay rates by hand, factoring in union rules, prevailing wage requirements and state-by-state taxes.
They might then have to cross-check the spreadsheet math and manually double-enter the finalized numbers into a generic payroll system, and then again into their accounting software.
Trayd, according to Berger, dramatically reduces the time to perform all those tasks by capturing the time data directly from the field and automatically calculating the correct variable pay rates, union deductions, and multistate taxes.
“Unlike salaried workforces, construction workers can earn multiple different rates in a single day depending on the trade, the project, and whether the work falls under prevailing wage, state or union requirements,” she said. “Trayd was designed from day one to handle that complexity.”
National expansion
The product seems to be resonating in the industry. Trayd has grown revenue over 600% year over year and moves tens of millions of payroll dollars each week, according to Berger. Several hundred contractors use Trayd weekly. United General Contractors, Wohl Diversified Services and Titan Structural Group are among its customers.
The startup operates on a SaaS model, with pricing tied to the number of workers processed through payroll.
Trayd started in New York and the broader Northeast, where union density and regulatory complexity are highest. It is now expanding nationally. Presently, it has about two dozen employees.
Before Trayd, Berger co-founded Curtn, a consumer social platform backed by Sam Altman that is now defunct.
She acknowledges that being female founders in a male-dominated industry has not been easy.
“As women building in construction — where we’re outnumbered 9 to 1 — the default assumption is that we’re too far removed or don’t have access to truly understand the problems on the ground. In the early years especially, there’s a ‘prove it twice’ dynamic. Without the benefit of the doubt, we had to earn credibility through repetition —- every meeting, every deal, every product decision. We’ve had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously,” she told Crunchbase News. “But that pressure becomes an advantage. You show up more prepared, you listen more closely, and you build conviction faster. Over time, that compounds into a better product and deeper, more trusted customer relationships.”
Tom Solleveld, director of communications and marketing at White Star Capital, said his firm was first impressed by Trayd’s founding team, describing Berger and Kessler as “a rare combination.”
“Anna’s background and family ties to the space allow her to understand the unique pain points contractors face from the inside,” he wrote via email. “Cara brings the technical depth to build mission-critical systems without sacrificing product simplicity.”
Beyond the caliber of the founders, White Star also believes that Trayd stands out because “it is truly a better product for its customers.”
“On a technical level, we were very impressed by how thoughtfully the product has been built,” Solleveld added. “We see that as a real advantage, because by structuring data cleanly at the system level, Trayd is better positioned to scale reliably and to become a strong foundation for AI in the construction industry over time.”
Venture investment in property technology startups has rebounded in recent years after plunging from the pandemic peak. In 2025, startups in the sector pulled in approximately $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing globally, per Crunchbase data. That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024, with much of the recent investment going to startups that promise greater ROI through the use of automation or AI.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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