Trayd, a construction payroll and workforce management platform for specialty trade contractors, has raised $10m in a Series A funding round.
The round was led by White Star Capital, with follow-on investments from Suffolk Technologies and Y Combinator, and a new strategic contribution from RXR, the New York-based real estate and technology investment firm.
Founded in 2021, Trayd offers an all-in-one back-office operating system designed specifically for specialty trade contractors. The platform combines payroll, HR, scheduling, and field tracking tools, handling wage calculations by trade type, multi-state tax obligations, compliance reporting, union rules, and project scope distinctions between state, federal, and private work.
Since launching, Trayd says it has cut average weekly payroll processing time from 14 hours to just 27 minutes — a reduction the company frames as returning nearly two full working days to back-office staff each week.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate product development and support Trayd’s national expansion.
The funding arrives as the US construction sector grapples with tightening compliance obligations. The US construction market generates $2tn annually, and specialty trade contractors outnumber general contractors 400 to one — yet the company argues that legacy software has historically been built for general contractors, leaving a significant gap. That gap has widened since 2023 updates to the Davis-Bacon Act introduced stricter requirements around payroll documentation and wage classifications, with contractors risking project disqualification and financial penalties for non-compliance. Since its founding, Trayd has quadrupled its headcount and grown revenues by 600% year-on-year.
Trayd co-founder and CEO Anna Berger said, “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.”
Co-founder and CTO Cara 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.”
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