Trayd, a New York City-based construction payroll and workforce management platform, announced it has raised $10 million in Series A funding to accelerate product development and national expansion. The round was led by White Star Capital, with participation from Suffolk Technologies and Y Combinator, along with a new strategic investment from RXR. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $15 million.
Founded in 2021, Trayd provides an all-in-one back-office operating system designed specifically for specialty trade contractors. Its platform includes payroll, HR, scheduling, and field tracking tools, and is built to handle complex wage calculations across trade types, multi-state tax obligations, union rules, and compliance reporting requirements. The company says its solution has reduced average weekly payroll processing time from 14 hours to 27 minutes, effectively returning nearly two full days of administrative labor per week.
The company is targeting a significant gap in the construction software market, where specialty contractors, despite outnumbering general contractors by a wide margin, have historically lacked purpose-built technology. With increasing compliance requirements, including updates tied to the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors face growing operational complexity around payroll and wage classification.
Trayd has experienced rapid growth since launch, quadrupling its team and achieving 600% year-over-year revenue growth. The company plans to use the new funding to further enhance its platform and expand its presence across the United States, where the construction industry generates approximately $2 trillion annually.
The platform integrates with major accounting systems and enterprise resource planning software, enabling contractors to streamline operations while maintaining compliance across diverse regulatory environments.
KEY QUOTES:
“Before Trayd, we spent up to 12 hours a week just fixing timesheets, with manual errors happening 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.”
Nate Lewis, Owner of United General Contractors
“The construction industry depends on financially strong, operationally sound trade partners to deliver projects successfully. 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.”
Diana Kay, Partner at Suffolk Technologies
“Specialty contractors represent the backbone of a massive construction industry, yet they have been historically overlooked by technological innovation. 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.”
Eddie Lee, General Partner at White Star Capital
“I grew up watching contractors spend hours every week trying to make payroll systems fit the realities of their jobs. 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. 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.”
Anna Berger, Co-Founder and CEO of Trayd; Cara Kessler, Co-Founder and CTO of Trayd
