Traydaa startup creating a back-office operating system for the construction industry has raised $10 million in Series A funding, Crunchbase News exclusively reports.
Capital of the White Star he led the company to a Series A that was raised in just three weeks and included participation from long-term sponsors Y Combinator AND Suffolk Technologies. The round also included an investment from a recent strategic sponsor RXR Real Estatereal estate and technology investing company. This brings New York-based Trayda’s total funding to $17 million.
Co-founder and CEO Anna Berger She grew up in a New York construction family and watched her father navigate razor-thin margins and complex compliance requirements.
“I saw firsthand the operational burden of juggling union regulations, multi-state labor laws, and endless manual back-office processes,” she recalls.
This experience inspired her to begin cooperation Kessler’s Waytechnical director of the company, who worked as a technical director for 10 years LinkedInonline platform leader to launch Trayd in 2021
Specialized trade services
For the uninitiated, specialty contractors are firms that send expert employees to a construction site to perform physical construction work. These contractors include concrete crews, electricians, plumbers, locksmiths, painters, and fireproofing employees. They are distinguished from general contractors, who generally manage and coordinate projects but do not normally perform practical trade work themselves.
Trayd automates payroll, HR, compliance and labor cost tracking for such contractors. Among the touted advantages is real-time visibility into labor, equipment and material costs.
The startup’s goal is to significantly reduce the time specialty trade contractors spend on the weekly payroll and compliance process.
“What once took 14 hours of manual work can now be done in less than 30 minutes,” Berger told Crunchbase News.
Trayd is working to fill what he believes is a unique gap in the market. Although there are many more specialty contractors than general contractors, most construction technologies were created for the latter, Berger says.
The startup’s closest competitors are legacy payroll providers akin to ADP AND Paychexalong with newer firms akin to Coronet AND Lumber.
“The difference is that most of these systems were not built with the complexity of specialized professions in mind,” explains Berger. “Trayd was.”
Payroll streamlining
Berger said compensation is extremely complex in construction. A single worker can receive 4 different pay rates in one day, depending on the specific trade project, project scope and jurisdiction.
“Generic” payroll platforms cannot cope with such constant rate variability, Berger says. For example, payroll administrators may receive stacks of paper timesheets or hours of phone calls from various job sites. They then must manually enter all of the field data into Excel spreadsheets and manually calculate pay rates, taking into account union rules, applicable wage requirements and state-by-state taxes.
They may then need to envision the math in a spreadsheet and manually enter the final numbers twice into the general payroll system and then back into the accounting software.
According to Berger, Trayd dramatically reduces the time it takes to finish all of those tasks by capturing time data directly from the field and robotically calculating the correct variable pay rates, union withholdings and taxes across multiple states.
“Unlike salaried workers, construction workers can earn many different wages in a given day, depending on the industry, the project and whether the work is subject to applicable wage, state or union requirements,” she said. “Trayd was designed from day one to handle this complexity.”
National expansion
The product appears to be resonating inside the industry. According to Berger, Trayd has grown revenue by greater than 600% yr over yr and is moving tens of thousands and thousands of dollars in payroll every week. Several hundred contractors use Trayd every week. United General Contractors, Wohl’s diversified services AND Tytan Structural Group belong to its clients.
The startup operates in the SaaS model, and prices are linked to the variety of employees supported by payroll.
Trayd began in New York and the Northeast, where union density and regulatory complexity are highest. It is now expanding to the entire country. It currently employs roughly twenty employees.
Before Trayd, Berger was co-founder Curtnconsumer social platform supported by Sam Altman which is currently closed.
She admits that being the founding father of a company in a male-dominated industry was challenging.
“As women working in the construction industry – where we are outnumbered 9 to 1 – our default assumption is that we are too far apart or don’t have the access to really understand the problems on the ground. Especially in the early years, there’s a ‘prove it twice’ dynamic.” Without a doubt, we had to realize credibility through repetition – every meeting, every transaction, every product decision. We needed to work twice as hard to be taken seriously,” she told Crunchbase News. “But that pressure becomes an advantage. You show up higher prepared, you listen more fastidiously, and you build conviction faster. Over time, this translates into a higher product and deeper, more trusted customer relationships.”
Eddie Leegeneral partner at White Star Capital, said his firm was impressed with Trayd’s founding team, describing Berger and Kessler as a “rare combination.”
“Anna’s background and family connections to this space give her an insider’s understanding of the unique issues performers face,” he wrote in an email. “Cara brings technical depth to building mission-critical systems without sacrificing product simplicity.”
In addition to the caliber of the founders, White Star also believes what sets Trayd apart is that it “truly is a better product for its customers.”
“From a technical perspective, we were very impressed with the thoughtful design of the product,” Lee added. (*3*)
Venture capital investment in real estate technology startups has rebounded in recent years after declining from the height of the pandemic. According to Crunchbase, in 2025, startups in this sector raised roughly $10.5 billion in seed-to-growth financing globally. data. That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024, with most of the recent investment going to startups that promise greater ROI through the use of automation or artificial intelligence.