Miter is an AI-native construction technology company developing an integrated operating system for contractors to manage payroll, human resources, field operations, safety, expenses, and job costs, serving more than 2,000 contractors and having raised $78 million in funding. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Miter Co-Founder and CEO Connor Watumull to learn more about the company’s origins, its AI-powered construction management platform, customer growth, funding, and plans to help contractors manage their workforce and operations more efficiently.
Connor Watumull’s Background
When asked about his background, Watumull said:
I’m the co-founder and CEO of Miter, which I started in 2021 with my co-founder, Tobin Paxton. I began my career at Bain & Company in Boston, where I spent long days and nights buried in spreadsheets, often wondering whether our clients would have been better off implementing software than hiring an expensive consultancy.
That question brought me to San Francisco to learn about software. I spent a year as a product manager at Tile, then a few years at Bessemer Venture Partners, investing in vertical software and exploring payments and accounting technology. I saw how much value gets created when companies like Procore, Toast, and ServiceTitan build deeply for one industry instead of selling generic tools to everyone.
On the side, I moonlighted as an unpaid intern at a construction accounting firm in the Bay Area. That’s where I saw firsthand how much pain contractors face running their businesses on legacy technology. Construction is one of the largest and most essential industries in the country, but most contractors still rely on decades-old software, spreadsheets, and paper. I wanted to help fix that, and Miter is the result.
How The Idea For Miter Came Together
When asked how the idea for Miter originated, Watumull explained:
The idea came out of my time investing in vertical software. Watching what Toast did for restaurants and Procore did for project management, I kept asking why construction, a $2 trillion industry, was still so slow and expensive to build in, and why the back office looked the way it did.
Tobin had his own version of that realization. On a visit home to Texas, his mother, a CPA, excitedly showed him the QuickBooks Desktop system she had just implemented to run payroll at her job. It was 2020.
So we set out to understand the problem up close. We spent time shadowing the back offices of contractors in California, sitting next to payroll administrators and controllers.
What we saw was a “Frankenstack”: a generic payroll provider, a legacy accounting system, a separate time-tracking app, and spreadsheets holding it all together.
The hardest part was labor compliance. Prevailing wage rates, union fringe tables, and certified payroll reports were being calculated by hand, every week, with real legal and financial risk if anything was off.
We decided to start with that hardest problem: California union and prevailing wage payroll. If we could get that right, we knew we’d earn contractors’ trust. From there we expanded nationally and built out the rest of the platform, from hiring and onboarding to time tracking, field operations, safety, and expenses, so the field and the office could finally work from one system.
Favorite Memories Working At Miter
When asked about his favorite memories working at the company, Watumull shared:
One that stands out is the early days of going live with our first customers. We’d sit with a payroll administrator on their first Miter payroll, a job that used to take them days of cross-checking prevailing wage rates and building certified payroll reports by hand, and watch it get done in a fraction of the time.
Seeing someone realize they could get their week back, and trust that the numbers were right, is why we built this.
More recently, announcing our Series B was a proud moment. Not because of the funding itself, but because of what it represented: more than 2,000 contractors trusting us with their people and their payroll, and roughly 2 of every 100 American construction workers now getting paid through Miter.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Miter’s core products and features, Watumull explained:
Miter is an AI-native operating system for construction that brings a contractor’s workforce, jobsites, and financials into one platform. It’s built around three areas:
People: Payroll and HR built for construction. Miter handles multi-state payroll, prevailing wage and union fringe rates, and certified payroll reporting automatically. It also covers digital onboarding, employee records, benefits and ACA administration, performance reviews, and applicant tracking.
Field operations: Mobile time tracking with GPS and geofencing, jobsite kiosks, crew time entry, scheduling, daily reports, and safety management, including toolbox talks, inspections, and incident tracking. Every hour is tagged to the right job and cost code.
Spend: Expense management, company cards, mileage, automated per diems, and bill pay, all job-costed from the start.
Miter syncs both ways with the construction ERPs and accounting systems contractors already use, like Sage, Viewpoint, Foundation, Acumatica, and QuickBooks, and with tools like Procore, HCSS, and ServiceTitan.
AI runs across the platform. In the back office, it parses invoices, receipts, and pay rate tables and surfaces labor and job cost trends while a job is still running. In the field, it can create safety reports from photos or voice notes and summarize job status.
Challenges In The Construction Technology Sector
When asked about challenges facing the construction sector and how Miter has addressed them, Watumull explained:
The biggest challenge in construction right now is labor. The U.S. is in the middle of a massive buildout, with data centers, energy, housing, and infrastructure all competing for the same skilled workers, while experienced tradespeople are retiring faster than they can be replaced.
Contractors have to hire, onboard, and retain crews faster than ever, often across multiple states with different wage, tax, and break rules.
For us, the challenge is that construction is genuinely complex. A single crew can trigger prevailing wage laws, certified payroll requirements, multi-state taxes, and OSHA recordkeeping all at once.
That complexity is why generic HR and payroll tools have never served contractors well, and it’s hard to build for.
We’ve approached it by going deep instead of broad. We started with the hardest problem, California prevailing wage and union payroll, and built the compliance logic natively rather than bolting it on.
We also invested early in a 100% U.S.-based support team that understands construction, so when a contractor calls with a certified payroll question, they’re talking to someone who knows the answer.
How Miter’s Technology Has Evolved
When asked how the company’s technology has evolved since launching, Watumull explained:
We started as a payroll product focused on one very hard problem: California prevailing wage and union payroll. Once we got that right, contractors started asking us to take on the work around it.
That pulled us into the full employee lifecycle, from applicant tracking and digital onboarding to benefits, ACA reporting, and performance management.
Then into the field with time tracking, scheduling, daily reports, and safety. Then into spend, with expense management, company cards, per diems, and bill pay.
Today contractors run their workforce, field operations, job costing, and expenses on Miter across hundreds of thousands of active jobs each month.
The biggest shift over the last couple of years has been AI. Because all of a contractor’s labor, field, and spend data lives in one system, we can do a lot more with it.
Miter now reads and structures invoices, receipts, and pay rate tables, runs workflows contractors used to do by hand, creates safety reports from photos or voice notes, and surfaces job cost trends while the job is still running instead of weeks after it closes.
Next, we’re building deeper into the financial side of the business with accounts payable automation and project intelligence.
Significant Company Milestones
When asked about Miter’s most significant milestones, Watumull highlighted several achievements:
- Running our first payroll for a California prevailing wage contractor, which proved we could solve the hardest problem in construction payroll.
- Expanding to all 50 states and building out the full platform across HR, field operations, safety, and spend.
- Growing to more than 2,000 customers, from ENR Top 20 contractors like Clayco to family-owned specialty contractors. We’ve tripled our customer count in the last 18 months.
- Reaching the point where roughly two of every 100 American construction workers are paid through Miter.
- Launching Miter Safety earlier this year, and embedding AI across the platform.
- In September 2026, raising a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, with Bessemer Venture Partners and Coatue participating, bringing our total funding to $78 million.
Customer Success Stories
When asked about customer success stories demonstrating Miter’s impact, Watumull shared:
We have a lot of customers we’re proud of. Clayco, an ENR Top 5 design-build firm, uses Miter for HR, time tracking, and performance management. Haugland Group, a family-owned, union-strong infrastructure services company with more than 1,600 employees, runs on Miter across energy, heavy civil, and marine work.
Muska Companies, a century-old Minnesota electrical and mechanical contractor with about 250 union field workers, runs payroll across more than 20 unions and seven states on Miter. Union setup went from an hour to minutes, and about 95% of certified payroll is now automated.
Benchmark Construction, a 225-person general contractor, used to spend three to three and a half months compiling annual review feedback. With Miter Performance, that process became simple, and field adoption beat their expectations.
Kaufman Lynn Construction, an ENR 400 general contractor in Florida, runs payroll, time tracking, HR, expenses, and field operations on Miter, integrated with Sage Intacct and Procore. Payroll went from three days to same-day, and they eliminated 90% of their job costing errors.
You can read more stories from contractors like Green Mechanical, MECO, W.J. O’Neil, and Wicker Construction on miter.com.
Funding And Revenue Metrics
When asked about Miter’s funding, revenue, and financial performance, Watumull shared:
In September 2026, we announced a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, with participation from our existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Coatue.
That brings our total funding to $78 million. Our investors have backed companies like Shopify, Toast, Procore, and ServiceTitan, so they understand what it takes to build a category-defining vertical software company.
On the business side, Miter serves more than 2,000 contractors. We’ve tripled our customer count in the last 18 months, and roughly two of every 100 American construction workers now get paid through Miter.
We’re using the new funding to keep investing in AI products for the back office and the jobsite, grow our engineering teams in San Francisco and New York, and expand our go-to-market teams across the U.S.
Total Addressable Market
When asked about the total addressable market Miter is pursuing, Watumull explained:
Construction is one of the largest industries in the U.S., with more than $2 trillion in annual spending and over 8 million workers. It’s also one of the least digitized.
Our core market is the more than 100,000 commercial, civil, industrial, and specialty contractors that deal with complex labor requirements like prevailing wage, union rates, certified payroll, and job costing.
Those firms employ millions of workers, and almost all of them are running on a patchwork of generic payroll, legacy accounting software, and spreadsheets.
We’ve barely scratched the surface. Even with more than 2,000 customers, we serve a small fraction of that market.
And as we expand from payroll and HR into field operations, safety, spend, accounts payable, and project intelligence, the opportunity per customer grows.
Over time, the same platform can serve the broader built world, including industries like manufacturing, energy, and field services that share many of the same workforce challenges.
What Differentiates Miter From Its Competition
When asked what distinguishes Miter from traditional payroll providers and construction software platforms, Watumull explained:
Most contractors have two options today. They can use a generic HR and payroll provider like ADP or Rippling, which was designed for office workers and wasn’t built around job costing, prevailing wage, union fringes, or certified payroll.
Or they can use legacy construction software that handles some of that, but with decades-old technology, manual workflows, and poor integrations.
Usually they end up with both, plus spreadsheets in between.
Miter is different in a few ways:
- Built for construction from day one. Prevailing wage, union rate tables, certified payroll, multi-state taxes, and job costing are native, not add-ons.
- One platform for the field and the office. HR, payroll, time tracking, safety, and expenses live in one system, so data flows in real time instead of being re-keyed across three to five tools.
- Works with the systems contractors already use. Two-way integrations with Sage, Viewpoint, Foundation, Acumatica, QuickBooks, Procore, and more mean contractors don’t have to rip out their ERP.
- AI-native. Because the data is unified, our AI can automate back-office work and surface job cost insights while the job is still running.
- People who know construction. Our support team is 100% U.S.-based and understands construction payroll and compliance.
Future Company Goals
When asked about Miter’s future goals, Watumull outlined plans to expand its AI capabilities and develop a more comprehensive operating system for the construction industry:
Our vision is a better built world. The U.S. has never needed this much new infrastructure this fast, and we want to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to build it by giving contractors the technology they deserve.
In the near term, that means taking on more of the work contractors still do by hand.
We’re building out accounts payable automation and project intelligence, so contractors can see budget versus actuals and labor costs in real time and make decisions while a job is still running.
We’ll also keep extending AI across the platform to help contractors build stronger teams and increase their profits.
Longer term, we want Miter to be the operating system for construction: the one place where a contractor’s people, projects, and payments come together.
We’re growing our engineering team in San Francisco and New York and our go-to-market teams across the country to get there.
The Importance Of Skilled Trades In America’s Infrastructure Expansion
Watumull concluded by discussing the importance of construction workers and modernizing the technology used by contractors:
One thing I’d add is how important the people in the trades are to everything happening in the economy right now.
Every data center, power plant, housing project, and highway depends on electricians, welders, carpenters, pipe fitters, and ironworkers.
Yet the companies that employ them are often running on technology that slows them down.
When the field and the office are on one system and labor data flows in real time, contractors stop guessing at their highest cost and get back to building.
That’s what gets our team out of bed every day.
