AI-native project accounting for the $2 trillion construction industry.
Adaptive's wordmark. The company sells the least glamorous software in construction - the money side - and 280 builders have signed up for it. New York, NY.
Construction is a $2 trillion industry that, for the most part, still reconciles receipts by hand. Bills arrive as PDFs and paper. Someone has to figure out which job they belong to, which cost code, whether the vendor's insurance is current, and whether there's budget left to pay them. Multiply that across dozens of active projects and the back office becomes the place where profit quietly leaks out.
Adaptive is a New York fintech built to plug that leak. Its platform sits on top of the accounting systems builders already use - primarily QuickBooks - and automates the construction-specific work those systems were never designed to handle: reading incoming bills, matching them to the right job and cost code, routing them for approval, tracking budgets and draws, managing vendor compliance and lien waivers, and moving the actual payment.
The company was founded in 2021 by Matt Calvano, Henry Bradlow, and Francisco Enriquez, and grew out of an unusual starting point: a hands-on, white-glove bookkeeping service for builders. Running that service is how the founders learned exactly where the manual work piled up - and what a software layer would have to do to remove it. By mid-2024, more than 280 construction companies were managing over $1.4 billion in project volume through the platform.
Most software sold to contractors is project-management software: schedules, drawings, punch lists. Adaptive deliberately picked a different lane - the finance and back-office side - and made it construction-specific. The AI engine reads a bill or receipt, proposes the correct job and cost code, and routes it through an approval chain. Budgets update in real time. Draw packages, the documents contractors submit to get paid by lenders and owners, are assembled automatically. Vendor documents and lien waivers are tracked so nobody pays a vendor who's out of compliance.
The customers are small and mid-sized construction businesses: custom homebuilders, commercial general contractors, remodelers, real estate developers, and specialty trades. Named users include high-profile residential builders NS Builders and Risinger Build. The pitch to them is not a new dashboard to learn - it's less manual data entry and fewer costly errors. One builder, NS Builders, had previously lost roughly $100,000 in reimbursable expenses to error-prone cost tracking.
Adaptive completely supercharged our back office process.
Reads bills and receipts, matches them to the right job and cost code, routes approvals, and processes payment.
Real-time construction budgets with automated draw package creation and construction-specific reporting.
Tracks vendor documents, insurance, and lien waivers, automating compliance across payables.
Bi-directional sync with QuickBooks Online so contractors keep their existing ledger.
Expense tracking, receivables, electronic payments, and dashboards for real-time visibility across projects.
Adaptive's strategic bet is that builders don't want to rip out the accounting system they already trust. Rather than replace QuickBooks, it automates around it. That's the wedge that separates Adaptive from broad construction suites like Procore and Buildertrend, which lead with project management, and from job-costing tools like Knowify. General AP-automation products such as Bill.com aren't built for construction's cost codes, draws, and lien waivers at all.
The other differentiator is speed to value. In an industry where software adoption often stalls, Adaptive advertises onboarding in under an hour - a deliberate answer to the friction that keeps busy field and finance teams off new tools.
The construction industry loses an estimated $273 billion a year to payment delays and disputes - the problem Adaptive is chasing.
Co-founder. Path ran through Morgan Stanley real estate banking, private equity at KSL Capital Partners, and a Stanford MBA before construction fintech.
Co-founder. Previously wrote algorithms to power rocket ships at SpaceX; now points that precision at construction invoices.
Co-founder. Former co-founder and managing director at Glasshouse Policy.
The mix is deliberate: someone who understands how construction money moves, someone who can build the automation, and someone who can run the finances of a company selling finance software. Adaptive employs roughly 76 people and, by third-party estimates, generates on the order of $3 million in annual revenue as it scales.
Adaptive charges construction companies for its automation platform on a subscription basis and layers payment processing on top of the project volume moving through it - positioning itself as the AI-native financial layer over existing accounting. It has raised about $26.4 million to date.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Key investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $6.5M | Jul 2022 | Andreessen Horowitz, Box Group, 3kvc, Gokul Rajaram |
| Series A | $19M | Jul 2024 | Emergence Capital, a16z, Definition, Exponent, Box Group |
Calvano, Bradlow, and Enriquez launch at the intersection of construction software and fintech.
Andreessen Horowitz leads a seed round to build financial software for construction businesses.
Adaptive opens its AI-native financial platform, layering automation on top of QuickBooks.
Emergence Capital leads a $19M round; Adaptive is named to CB Insights' 100 Most Innovative Fintech Startups with 280+ customers and $1.4B in project volume.
Adaptive is an AI-native financial platform for construction companies. It automates accounts payable, budgets and draws, vendor compliance, and payments, sitting on top of accounting systems like QuickBooks to handle construction-specific workflows.
Small and mid-sized construction businesses - custom homebuilders, general contractors, remodelers, developers, and specialty trades. By mid-2024, more than 280 companies managed over $1.4 billion in project volume on the platform.
About $26.4 million total, including a $6.5M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz (2022) and a $19M Series A led by Emergence Capital (2024).
CEO Matt Calvano, CTO Henry Bradlow (formerly of SpaceX), and CFO Francisco Enriquez. The idea grew out of running a white-glove bookkeeping service for builders.
Those tools focus on construction project management; Adaptive focuses on construction finance and back-office automation, and it works with existing accounting systems rather than replacing them.