The cloud network that turns construction's messiest paperwork — the change order — into something everyone can actually see.
Pictured: the Clearstory mark. A "clearstory" is the high band of windows that lets light into a room — which is either a very deliberate pun about transparency in construction, or a happy accident. Either way, the name does more work than most.
Here is a fact about the construction industry that is both boring and, once you sit with it, slightly alarming: on a large commercial project, a meaningful chunk of the work being done is not in the original contract. Someone decided mid-build to move a wall, upgrade a spec, or dig where the drawings said there was nothing. That extra work has a name - the change order - and for most of the industry's history it has lived in email threads, PDFs, and spreadsheets that two parties never quite agreed on.
Clearstory is a software company that decided this was worth fixing. Not construction management broadly, not scheduling, not drawings - just the change order, and the closely related "time and material" (T&M) tag that documents field-directed extra work. It is a narrow problem. It is also, by the company's own count, a problem worth roughly a billion dollars a month, because that is how much change order value flows across its network in a typical month.
The pitch is deceptively simple. Instead of a general contractor emailing a change order request to a subcontractor, who files it somewhere, who emails back a disputed number three weeks later, both parties work from the same document on a shared network in real time. The GC sees it. The sub sees it. The owner, eventually, sees it. Nobody is retyping anything. The idea that this was not already the case in 2018 tells you something about how construction software had, until recently, been built.
Contractors share over 19,000 change orders worth more than $850 million on our network every single month.
Clearstory was founded by Cameron Page, who studied construction management at Cal Poly and then spent more than ten years in commercial construction before starting the company in 2018. This is the useful kind of origin story - not a founder who spotted a market from the outside, but one who had personally lost time and money to the change order gap enough times to build the tool he wished had existed.
Page frames the core issue as "the Change Order Gap": the structural misalignment between different parties' financial systems over work that has been done but not yet priced, approved, or reconciled. It is the space between "we did the extra work" and "we got paid for the extra work," and in that space live disputes, delayed payments, and a great deal of avoidable friction. Clearstory's product is essentially an argument that this gap is a data problem, not a human-nature problem.
The company did not start life with its current name. It launched as Extracker - a fairly literal name for a tool that tracks extra work - and rebranded to Clearstory in June 2023. The new name leans on the architectural term (a clerestory is the row of high windows that lets daylight into a large room) and the transparency metaphor it implies. Renaming a B2B company that already has paying customers is not a small decision. Doing it to lean harder into "trust and transparency" suggests the company concluded its real product was not tracking, but visibility - two adversarial parties looking at the same truth.
Create, price, track, and align on change orders in real time. Both sides of the deal - GC and sub - see the same live document instead of trading PDFs.
Capture field-directed extra work - labor, materials, equipment - on a phone, and share it instantly with an audit-ready record. The iOS app is literally titled "Paperless T&M."
A shared, cloud-based change order log giving every stakeholder real-time visibility into status, cost exposure, and where each item sits in the approval process.
Pushes change data into Procore, Sage, CMiC, Vista (Viewpoint), and Autodesk - so the change order syncs to the accounting system instead of becoming another silo.
Monthly change order volume is a good proxy for whether a network product is actually working. A tool people don't trust sits empty. Clearstory's volume roughly 10x'd between 2021 and 2024, which is the shape you want if your whole thesis is "everyone will agree to stand on the same neutral ground."
The catch with network products is that they are slow to start and hard to stop. Getting a general contractor and its subs onto the same platform takes trust that scales slower than software. Clearstory appears to have crossed that threshold.
Cameron Page launches the company with paying customers, after 10+ years in commercial construction.
Raises a Series A as monthly change order volume reaches roughly $90M.
Extracker becomes Clearstory and raises $5.5M led by GS Futures; monthly volume climbs to ~$500M.
One of the world's largest general contractors rolls out Clearstory across its jobsites.
Closes a Prudence-led round; total funding reaches ~$33.9M and monthly volume hits ~$1B.
Clearstory has raised about $33.9M in total. The most recent round - a $16M Series B in June 2024 - was led by Prudence, with new participation from Industry Ventures and continued support from the early backers who had been with the company since its Extracker days.
The investor list reads like people who specifically wanted exposure to construction's digitization: Building Ventures, Jackson Square Ventures, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, and Goldman Sachs' GS Futures. That continuity - the same firms writing bigger checks round after round - is usually a quieter vote of confidence than any headline number.
Most construction software wants to be a platform - the one place you do everything. Clearstory made the opposite bet. It picked one workflow and went deep, and it built for a strange requirement: the product has to be trusted by two parties who are, on any given change order, negotiating against each other.
That is the actual trick. A change order tool owned by the general contractor is just the GC's tool. A change order tool the subcontractor also trusts becomes a shared record - and a shared record is the only thing that closes the gap. Clearstory's design problem was less "how do we track this" and more "how do we be neutral enough that both sides put their real numbers in."
The company runs on four stated values - Be Curious, Customer Obsession, Keep it Simple, and Raise the Bar - and has grown from roughly 50 people in 2023 to around 110, with a leadership team that mixes construction veterans and SaaS operators.
Sector: Commercial construction, heavy civil, and specialty trades. Users span general contractors, subcontractors, and project owners across North America.
Broad suites like Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud - and, mostly, the incumbent that never goes away: email, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Clearstory partners with the suites (it integrates with Procore) rather than replacing them.
A "clearstory" (clerestory) is a high band of windows that lets light in. For a transparency product in construction, that is either very clever or very lucky.
The original name was a literal description - tracking "extra" work. The 2023 rebrand traded literal for aspirational.
Cameron Page didn't research the market. He lived the problem for 10+ years on jobsites first, then built the fix.
Clearstory brands its core problem "the Change Order Gap" - the mismatch between work done and work priced.
Integrations with Sage, CMiC, Vista, and Procore aren't flashy. They're the reason the whole thing actually works.
It's a cloud-based platform that lets general contractors, specialty contractors, and owners create, price, track, and align on construction change orders and time-and-material (T&M) tags in real time, on a shared network.
Yes. The company was founded in 2018 as Extracker and rebranded to Clearstory in June 2023 to emphasize trust and transparency.
Cameron Page founded the company in 2018. He studied construction management at Cal Poly and spent over a decade in commercial construction before starting it.
Roughly $33.9M in total, including a $16M Series B in June 2024 led by Prudence, with participation from Industry Ventures and existing investors.
Real-time integrations with construction and accounting systems including Procore, Sage, CMiC, Vista (Viewpoint), and Autodesk, so change data syncs with contractors' existing tools.