The least glamorous object on a construction site may also be the most expensive: a clipboard with a sign-in sheet clipped to it. The paper does not know whether a badge was borrowed, a certification expired or a foreman remembered to record the toolbox talk. When a claim lands months later, it offers no live headcount and very little truth. BiltOn built its business around that gap. The New York company verifies workers at the gate, links them to credentials and safety actions, and gives managers a record that survives after the concrete cures.
Founded in Israel in 2018 as Beti, the company began with construction safety. Its four founders - Omer Slavin, Asaf Guter, Shir Mautner and Dekel Schwarzmann - had served together as officers before managing residential projects in Poland and Israel. Slavin, now chief executive, is a fourth-generation builder who trained as a lawyer. That combination makes the product feel less like generic workflow software and more like an argument assembled for cross-examination: Who was there? Were they trained? Which form was signed? What happened next?
Win the gate, earn the building
BiltOn's most legible product is access control. Workers can self-onboard by phone, upload credentials, complete orientations and approach a turnstile that uses 3D facial verification. Entry and exit create a timestamped record. A live dashboard shows who is present, by trade and site. Credentials can gate access: expired training is not merely a red cell in a spreadsheet; it can become a stopped entry.
That is the wedge. Once identity is dependable, adjacent workflows become more useful. BiltOn digitizes pre-task plans, toolbox talks, hot-work permits, job hazard analyses, observations, incidents, daily logs and certification tracking. It connects to Procore and Autodesk, so attendance and contractor records need not be typed into a second system. Executives get portfolio views; superintendents get a morning headcount; risk teams get an audit trail. The same event at the gate serves several departments without asking a worker to become a data-entry clerk.
This is where the company differs from a plain turnstile vendor or a broad project-management suite. The former may control a door without understanding a pre-task plan. The latter may hold documents without proving which person entered. BiltOn wants the worker-level record underneath both. Its newer pitch, “Safety Intelligence,” adds risk scores, leading indicators and predictive dashboards. The goal is to spot weak routines before an incident, then present cleaner evidence to executives, regulators, carriers and claims teams.
What it cost - and what failed first
BiltOn does not publish a price sheet. It sells enterprise software through demos and scoped agreements, sometimes with gates, turnstiles and integrations in the mix. The most candid cost story comes from Lettire Construction, a New York affordable-housing builder. Cost was initially a sticking point; BiltOn was not the cheapest option. That matters because construction technology is littered with tools bought by headquarters and quietly ignored in the field.
What failed first was the old badging ritual. Badges went missing, phones were forgotten and a sudden delivery of 30 subcontractor workers could trap foremen and safety managers in the trailer. Lettire said onboarding such a group had taken about two hours. With QR self-registration, workers entered their details before arrival and the site team verified them in minutes. The changed mind did not come from a glossy dashboard. It came from counting the hours returned to people whose actual work was outside.
“You can't lose your face.”Greg Stewart, Lettire Construction, on replacing badges
After six months, Lettire moved to an enterprise agreement for new projects. Vorea, another New York builder, followed a related path. It began with access control, then connected worker logs to Procore and Power BI to compare trade hours, headcount and production. Its next projects were slated to open with BiltOn from day one. The pattern is the business model in miniature: land on one painful workflow, prove field adoption, then widen into compliance and management.
That expansion also explains who can justify the bill. The daily user may be a worker or superintendent, but the economic buyer can sit in operations, safety or risk. One group values fewer onboarding hours. Another values complete training records, a faster emergency muster or evidence against a questionable labor claim. BiltOn can therefore sell the same underlying record against several budgets and several definitions of return. The catch is organizational: someone must own deployment across projects, align subcontractors and decide how biometric data is retained. Software cannot settle those questions by itself. The customer with a named champion and repeatable site-opening process has a much better chance than the customer running a one-off technology trial.
From Beti to a bigger bet
The company opened a Brooklyn office in 2022 and raised an $11 million growth round led by PSG Equity to reinforce Israel and expand along the U.S. East Coast. Two years later it changed its name from Beti to BiltOn and raised a $15 million Series B, again led by PSG with Titan Capital and 97212 Ventures participating. The company said U.S. annual recurring revenue had grown twentyfold between the rounds. It also reported more than 1,200 construction companies using the platform across more than 3,000 active jobsites.
The rebrand was more than fresh paint. Beti's early identity belonged to safety software; BiltOn's current map runs from workforce verification through safety management to risk prevention. Its named U.S. customers include Consigli, Rudin, Hunter Roberts, SD Builders and OKO Group. It operates across residential, commercial, civil, industrial, healthcare and infrastructure projects. Recent material targets data-center builds, where sprawling perimeters, rotating specialist crews and high-security zones make verified access unusually valuable.
The competitive field is busy. A contractor can keep paper, combine a badge system with spreadsheets, buy focused safety tools such as HammerTech or Highwire, or extend a broad platform such as Procore. BiltOn's claim to space is the closed loop: the person at the gate, the credential, the daily safety action and the later risk report belong to one record. Its New York focus also gives it fluency in Department of Buildings requirements and Local Law 196 training records, a useful edge in a market where compliance is not decorative.
What a founder can steal
The copyable move is not facial recognition. It is choosing an unloved workflow whose accuracy already has several buyers. Attendance touches payroll, emergency response, labor disputes, training, insurance and litigation. Clean up that one event and the product can travel through the account. BiltOn also made the field interaction short: a QR code, a phone, a turnstile. The more elaborate intelligence sits behind the moment of use.
The stealable playbook
- Begin with a recurring operational bottleneck, not an executive dashboard.
- Create a verified record once, then reuse it across several expensive workflows.
- Measure time returned to frontline managers; that can reframe a higher sticker price.
- Integrate with systems customers already trust instead of demanding a clean-slate stack.
- Expand from record-keeping to prediction only after the underlying data is credible.
There are conditions where the model weakens. A small builder with one stable crew, an open site and light regulation may not recover the cost of biometric hardware and enterprise software. Facial verification also creates privacy, consent and data-governance obligations that vary by jurisdiction and workforce agreement. Weak connectivity can sour mobile onboarding. If subcontractors resist the workflow, or if credentials remain inaccurate upstream, a polished dashboard merely organizes bad inputs. And predictive risk needs enough consistent history to be more than a confident-looking score.
BiltOn's more interesting constraint is cultural. Construction crews do not arrive at work hoping to enrich a dataset. Adoption depends on giving them a faster morning, giving supervisors fewer forms and returning useful information before headquarters asks for it. The company's customer stories work when technology disappears into the gate and the routine. They fail when the software feels like one more inspector.
Where the hard hat meets the underwriter
BiltOn sits in a valuable seam between construction operations software and insurance technology. Today, its customers are builders, not carriers, and its revenue remains private. But the direction is clear: transform lagging evidence about accidents into leading evidence about behavior. A completed pre-task plan, a closed hazard, a credentialed crew and an accurate headcount are small facts. Across thousands of workers and sites, they become an argument about whether risk is improving.
That argument still needs independent proof. Company case studies and reported metrics are useful signals, not universal outcomes. Yet the underlying observation is sturdy. Risk cannot become predictive while the field record is late, incomplete or anonymous. BiltOn's job is to make the record trustworthy without slowing the build. It started with a missing badge and a crowded trailer. The bet now is that better mornings at the gate can eventually produce better years at renewal.