Company: Trayd
Co-Founders: Anna Berger (CEO) & Cara Kessler (CTO)
Website: https://www.buildtrayd.com/
About Trayd
Trayd is a construction payroll and compliance platform purpose-built for specialty trade contractors. While construction technology historically focused on general contractors or field jobsite tools, specialty trades like electricians, plumbers and concrete crews were left managing complex labor, compliance and accounting on 1990s desktop software.
Co-founded in 2021 by CEO Anna Berger, who grew up in a New York construction family, and CTO Cara Kessler, who spent ten years leading web platform engineering at LinkedIn, Trayd addresses the single hardest operational bottleneck in commercial construction: workforce finance. Specialty trade contractors operate under intricate prevailing wage laws, multi-state tax rules, union fringe rate structures and strict compliance mandates. Legacy systems force back office teams to manually calculate pay rates across spreadsheets for days every week.
Trayd solves this by unifying field labor tracking, payroll, union compliance and native construction accounting into a single real-time platform. Labor costs, equipment charges and vendor invoices post directly to a digital construction general ledger as work happens in the field. As a result, specialty trade contractors reduce average weekly payroll processing time from 14 hours down to 27 minutes while gaining real-time visibility into project profitability.
Serving over 120 specialty trade contractors across North America, Trayd has achieved over 600 percent year-over-year revenue growth. In 2026, the company closed a 10 million dollar Series A funding round in three weeks led by White Star Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Suffolk Technologies, and RXR, bringing total funding to 15 million dollars.
By bringing modern automation, mobile field access, and real-time ledger accounting to an underserved sector, Trayd is setting the standard for vertical SaaS in commercial construction.
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