Trayd, a New York City-based construction payroll and workforce platform, has closed a $10 million Series A round, bringing its total funding to $15 million. The round was led by White Star Capital and drew follow-on investments from Suffolk Technologies and Y Combinator, alongside a new strategic investment from RXR, a New York-based real estate and technology investment firm. The company will use the capital to accelerate product development and expand nationally.
The U.S. construction market generates around $2 trillion annually. Specialty trade contractors, from electricians to plumbers to glaziers, outnumber general contractors 400 to 1, yet the software industry has largely built for general contractors. Trayd was built specifically to close that gap. The platform combines payroll, HR, scheduling, and field tracking into a single back-office operating system, handling the full complexity of the trades: union rules, prevailing wages, multi-state tax obligations, Davis-Bacon compliance, and project-level reporting.
"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."
The platform's impact on day-to-day operations is significant. Since launch, Trayd has reduced average weekly payroll processing time from 14 hours to 27 minutes, effectively returning almost two full working days to back-office teams each week. That 31x productivity gain is not an abstraction. United General Contractors reported spending up to 12 hours per week fixing timesheets before Trayd, with manual errors occurring roughly 17% of the time.
"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," said Archie Goldsmith, Field Operations Manager at United General Contractors.
The timing of this round is not incidental. Compliance pressure in the construction industry has increased sharply following 2023 updates to the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires contractors to rigorously document payroll and wage classifications or risk project disqualification and financial penalties. Trayd's platform was built to handle exactly that complexity.
Trayd was founded in 2021 by CEO Anna Berger, a second-time founder who grew up in a construction family, and CTO Cara Kessler, who spent a decade at LinkedIn before co-founding the company. That combination of industry familiarity and engineering experience shaped the platform from the ground up.
"I grew up watching contractors spend hours every week trying to make payroll systems fit the realities of their jobs," said Berger. "We're building the infrastructure that finally matches the complexity of how construction actually works."
Kessler added: "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. We're bringing modern engineering discipline to a system that historically relied on spreadsheets and manual work."
Since founding, the company has grown its team from six to 24 employees and achieved over 600% year-over-year revenue growth. Trayd integrates with all major accounting and ERP systems and is available to specialty trade contractors across the United States.
White Star Capital led this Series A, which closed in 2026. The firm's General Partner, Eddie Lee, pointed to Trayd's founding team as a key driver of the investment.
"Specialty contractors represent the backbone of a massive construction industry, yet they have been historically overlooked by technological innovation," Lee said. "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."
Alongside White Star Capital, Trayd counts Suffolk Technologies, Y Combinator, and RXR among its investors. The Y Combinator participation is notable: follow-on investments from the accelerator are relatively rare and signal continued confidence in the company's trajectory.
