The problem looked small enough to fit inside an inbox. A subcontractor would send a change-order request. A general contractor would save the attachment, compare it with a spreadsheet, hunt for a project number, and type the cost into another system. Somewhere else, a superintendent might have signed a carbon-copy time-and-material ticket for work already under way. Each artifact made sense by itself. Together they produced a peculiar result: everyone could be keeping records, and nobody could be sure they shared the same record.
Cameron Page spent nine years at Devcon Construction living inside that contradiction. He worked on projects around the San Francisco Bay Area, from tenant improvements to large corporate campuses. His project list included work associated with Apple, Stanford, and Google. Buildings were becoming more digitally designed and faster to revise, yet the money attached to those revisions still moved through email, PDFs, spreadsheets, and paper tickets.
Page had arrived there by the practical route. He began as an apprentice carpenter in Sacramento while still in high school, studied construction management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and moved through field and project roles. The sequence matters. Before he was selling software to contractors, he had been one of the people accountable when drawings changed, extra work began, and the cost had not caught up.
The space between the systems
By 2018, Page had reached what Clearstory’s company history calls a breaking point. He was requesting logs from trade partners, organizing incompatible formats, distributing design changes, chasing review correspondence, and trying to account for tickets signed in the field. Devcon had standard project and financial software. So did many of the other companies on a job. The trouble was not the absence of internal systems. It was the gap between them.
That observation became Extracker. The first version launched in mid-2018 and found paying customers. A year later, the team re-architected the product around a business-network model. The distinction sounds technical, but its practical meaning is simple: a change order should not have to become a new piece of data every time it crosses a company boundary. The specialty contractor, general contractor, and owner need a shared view, even if each keeps a different financial system behind it.
This was not a campaign to replace every tool already in the trailer and accounting office. Page has argued that construction companies will differentiate themselves by assembling a technology stack from the best available tools. Clearstory’s role is connective: maintain the live change-order log, capture digital T&M work, distribute pricing requests, and pass structured information toward systems such as Procore, Sage, CMiC, HCSS, and Vista.
The company’s progress can be read through those connections. A Procore integration arrived in 2020. A seed round and a change-order review page followed in 2021. In 2022, Extracker raised a $7 million Series A, opened a Walnut Creek office, and added Sage and CMiC integrations. The product had begun with tracking, but the company was learning to sit alongside the industry’s existing records instead of asking customers to pretend those records did not exist.
A clearer name for a larger idea
In 2023, Extracker acquired DataStreet and changed its name to Clearstory. Extracker described an activity. Clearstory described the desired outcome. The new name also nodded toward a clerestory, the high windows that bring light into a building. By then, the company reported about 50 employees and roughly $500 million in change orders moving through the platform each month.
The rebrand also captured Page’s widening thesis. A change order is not merely an administrative document. It is where design, schedule, budget, and responsibility meet. Specialty contractors may finance extra work while they wait for approval. General contractors need to know whether every submitted cost is in the forecast. Owners need an early view of exposure before the final number arrives. A delayed answer can tighten cash flow on one side and create a surprise on another.
The company’s $16 million Series B in June 2024, led by Prudence Ventures, gave that thesis more room. At the announcement, Clearstory said contractors were sharing more than 19,000 change orders worth about $850 million every month. It named customers including Suffolk, Clayco, KONE, Performance Contracting Group, Barton Malow, and Swinerton. Later that year, its own timeline put the monthly value near $1 billion.
Page’s connections in construction technology also became more explicit. Clearstory joined seven other practitioner-founded companies to launch Built by Builders, a group organized around the belief that industry experience should shape industry software. The idea fits his biography neatly, but it is more than branding. Construction adoption depends on the details: who is allowed to sign, which rate applies, how a revision is tracked, and which party is carrying the cost while everyone waits.
Network first, intelligence second
The next chapter is AI, though Page’s version begins with the workflow rather than the acronym. In May 2026, Clearstory introduced four purpose-built agents: one to analyze a change notification and identify affected trades, one to help price a change-order request, one to flag exceptions during review, and one to turn a field voice note into a draft T&M tag. The COR Pricing Agent entered closed beta first.
Page says the average project team spends 16 to 30 hours a week on change-order administration, citing research conducted with Dodge. The proposed agents aim at the repetitive parts of that burden: matching rates, checking required backup, finding exceptions, drafting records. Clearstory says every output goes to human review before it moves. That is an important constraint in a workflow where a generated line item can become a disputed cost.
There is a useful product sequence here. First, establish a shared workflow. Then accumulate structured activity across the network. Only then place automation inside the moments where the context already exists. Page has been skeptical that AI will make change orders disappear. Weather, unforeseen conditions, evolving designs, and owners changing their minds are part of building. Faster design tools may produce more iteration, not less. His bet is that the accounting of change can finally move at the speed of the change itself.
The founder returns to the job
Vertical software founders are often described as having domain expertise, a phrase so tidy it can obscure the source. Page’s expertise came from repetition: the inbox checks, the missing project numbers, the awkward call about an unrecognized cost, the spreadsheet assembled before a forecast meeting. Nine years was long enough to discover that the problem was not one bad form. It was a shared process without shared memory.
There is a full-circle detail in his story. Clearstory is being used on Cal Poly’s large student-housing project, including the renovation of the dorm where Page lived as a freshman. The construction management graduate who once learned by doing returned, indirectly, as the founder of software used on the work. It is a modest image of what he seems to want from technology: not a separate digital construction industry, but tools that disappear into the act of building and leave the people involved with fewer loose ends.
The public details around Page add a few useful coordinates. He is an Eagle Scout and holds a LEED AP Building Design + Construction credential. Clearstory’s stated values begin with curiosity, customer focus, simplicity, and ownership. In interviews, Page repeatedly explains the company through an actual project question or a specific handoff: the unpriced ticket, the unmatched request, the cost absent from a forecast. His case for AI is similarly concrete, measured in administrative hours and records prepared for human review. Across those accounts, the vocabulary stays close to the job: how the work moves, where information stalls, and what the next person needs in order to act.
Page’s public language returns often to alignment, transparency, and relationships. Those words can sound soft beside forecasts and contract values. On a construction project, they are financial terms. A trade partner who knows a request was received can plan. A general contractor who sees every outstanding item can forecast. An owner who sees the progression of a cost can decide earlier. Shared facts do not remove negotiation, but they give the negotiation a place to begin.
Clearstory is now larger than the frustration that started it, and its automation plans reach beyond the original log. The test remains the one Page supplied when an executive asked what his software could answer that other systems could not: Is all the exposure captured? It is the kind of question a project manager asks before a founder turns it into a company.