Know·ify

Walk into most small construction firms and you will find the same quiet problem. The work in the field is under control. The office is not. Estimates live in one spreadsheet, billing in another, and the question of who worked which hours on which job is a text-message archaeology project. Knowify, a software company founded in 2012 and headquartered at 45 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, was built to close that gap.

The company makes cloud-based construction management software aimed at a specific and often overlooked customer: the trade contractor. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC crews, painters, remodelers, concrete and roofing outfits - the specialty subs and self-performing firms that do the actual building. These businesses are typically too small for the enterprise platforms built around half-billion-dollar general contractors, and too complex for accounting software alone.

Knowify's answer is to put project management and construction financials in the same system. On the project side that means estimating, proposals and contracts, change orders, RFIs and submittals, scheduling, document management, and a client portal. On the financial side it means real-time job costing, AIA-style progress billing, invoicing, purchase orders, and certified payroll for prevailing-wage work. The connective tissue is a deep, two-way integration with QuickBooks - long the ledger of record for small contractors, and long a poor fit for the way construction jobs actually get costed.

That integration is the founding wedge. Co-founder and CEO Marc Visent and co-founder Daniel de Roulet Jr. built Knowify around the reality that their customers already lived in QuickBooks and were not going to leave it. Rather than replace the contractor's accounting system, Knowify sits on top of it, adding the job costing, work-in-progress reporting and progress billing that QuickBooks lacks, and syncing the results back both ways.

"Construction businesses are insanely complex, and most construction workers entered the field because they hate desk work." - Daniel de Roulet Jr., co-founder

The customer thesis has stayed remarkably stable. Where competitors have drifted upmarket toward larger logos, Knowify has kept its focus on firms with roughly a dozen to a couple hundred employees. That discipline is also its market position: Procore is built for large general contractors, Buildertrend for residential home builders, and service platforms like Jobber and ServiceTitan for dispatch-heavy home services. Knowify sits in the space between them, serving the trade sub who needs both long-term project billing and day-to-day service work.

Investors bought the thesis. In November 2021 Knowify raised a $5.45M Series A led by MassMutual Ventures and Companyon Ventures, with Dreamit Ventures, CEAS Investments and LAB Ventures participating. A further $3M followed in July 2023. The money has gone toward deepening the platform rather than chasing a different customer - most recently into an integration with Intuit Enterprise Suite in early 2025 for multi-entity contractors, and an AI Connector that lets a contractor query real job data through tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

Reviewers on G2 and Capterra, where Knowify holds 4.5 stars across roughly a hundred reviews, tend to say the same things: the QuickBooks sync is accurate, the job costing is clear, and onboarding support is strong. The recurring criticism - a mobile app that trails the desktop experience - is the kind of gap a focused company can close. What the reviews describe, in aggregate, is not a flashy product. It is a useful one.