He spent a decade making Google's engineers faster. Now he is making America's construction sites fairer - one verified subcontractor at a time.
Picture a general contractor on a publicly funded school. The contract says a real slice of the work must go to small, local, and diverse trade partners - minority-owned, woman-owned, disadvantaged-business-certified. Noble on paper. In practice, the contractor blasts out a few hundred invitations to bid, crosses their fingers, and hopes enough qualified firms reply before the clock runs out. Amar Amte calls this "spray and pray." Pegbo, his company, exists to end it.
Pegbo runs a searchable directory of more than a million verified trade partners, filterable by certification - MBE, DBE, WBE - by location, and by NAICS code. It automates the outreach, tracks who is actually credentialed (not just who claims to be), and then generates the Good Faith Effort reports that prove to a public agency the contractor genuinely tried. The unglamorous paperwork that decides who gets a fair shot at building schools, hospitals, and affordable housing - that is the business Amar chose.
He started Pegbo in 2023 from Menlo Park. By late 2024 he had raised $1.4 million, signed up as a pre-qualified supplier to four of the biggest names in American construction, and watched site traffic double in a single quarter. Not bad for someone who, two years earlier, had never poured a foundation in his life.
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The first version of Pegbo rented out construction equipment. A marketplace - list your idle excavator, someone nearby books it. Reasonable idea. But talking to customers, Amar kept hearing about a deeper, stickier pain that had nothing to do with machines: contractors could not find, vet, or prove they had reached the small and diverse subcontractors their public contracts demanded.
So he turned the ship. Equipment rental became a feature, not the thesis. The new Pegbo is a procurement and compliance platform. Amar credits his outsider's eye - the fact that he came from search and developer tools, not from a family business in concrete - as the reason he could see the bigger problem instead of defending the original plan.
Amar's resume reads like a tour of the consumer web. He started as a senior test engineer at Slide, the social-widget company. He spent about five years at Yahoo, where his title was literally "Technical Yahoo," running test engineering. He managed quality at Kohl's eCommerce. Then came roughly a decade at Google, leading developer-productivity and commerce engineering programs - the internal teams whose whole job is to make other engineers faster.
That is a career spent on a single question: how do you remove friction from work that thousands of people repeat every day? Construction's bid-and-compliance grind is the same question wearing a hard hat. The training transferred. The wardrobe changed.
He studied computer technology for his bachelor's at Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering, earned a master's in computer science and mathematics from Cal State East Bay, and picked up coursework at UC Berkeley along the way.
Good Faith Effort reporting, certification expiry, bid coverage - it is rules-heavy, repetitive, and high-stakes. Exactly the kind of work that quietly eats human hours and quietly hides a market.
Coming from search and dev-tools rather than construction let Amar question habits insiders accept. The pivot from rentals to procurement came from listening, not from sunk cost.
A small, certified, woman-owned electrician can do the work. If no contractor can find her before the bid closes, none of that matters. Pegbo's whole job is to make her findable.
Construction is a famously skeptical industry. Decades-old firms do not hand the keys to newcomers easily. Yet Pegbo is a pre-qualified supplier to Hathaway Dinwiddie, Skanska, Webcor, and Swinerton - the kind of names that build skylines and stadiums. The State of California certified Pegbo as a Small Business Enterprise, which is a nice irony: the platform that helps small businesses get found is itself a small business getting found.
In late 2024 Amar announced an automated spend-tracking tool rolling out across multi-million-dollar national projects, and Pegbo's web traffic doubled in three months. The pre-seed - $1.4 million, led by Nirman Ventures with angel backing - gave the company room to push on AI-powered bid and RFP analysis and even voice-based outreach to subcontractors.
His official founder photo shows him on a job site in a hard hat, sunglasses, and an orange hi-vis vest. Most software CEOs pose in front of a brick wall. Amar went to the dirt.
Pegbo's directory holds over a million verified trade partners. That is roughly the population of a mid-sized American city, all searchable by credential.
Yahoo, Google, Kohl's, Slide. He worked at four companies most people have personally used, then walked away to learn an entirely new trade.
For a stretch, his actual job title was Technical Yahoo. Hard to top that on a business card - though "construction founder" is making a run at it.
Sources: pegbo.com · LinkedIn · The Org · Frontlines / Category Visionaries podcast · American Bazaar (Nov 2024) · Rathmann Insights · Sustainable Construction Review. Profile compiled from public records; figures reflect reporting as of the 2024 pre-seed announcement.