A quiet operator for an industry that runs on paper
Marc Visent spends his days thinking about a problem most people never see: the moment a contractor finishes a job and cannot say, with any confidence, whether it made money. As co-founder and chief executive of Knowify, he has built a cloud platform whose whole purpose is to answer that question in real time - estimates, costs, change orders, invoices and accounting stitched into one place for the small construction firms that keep American cities standing.
Knowify is not a household name, and Visent seems comfortable with that. The company sells to trade contractors and subcontractors - electricians, plumbers, framers, remodelers - the kind of businesses that entered the field to build things, not to fill out spreadsheets. That tension is the entire reason the company exists. "Construction businesses are insanely complex," his co-founder Daniel de Roulet Jr. has put it. "It's a cruel irony that most construction workers entered the field because they hate desk work."
Visent's answer to that irony is software that takes the desk work off the owner's plate. From Knowify's office at 45 Broadway in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Wall Street, he leads a team building tools for job costing, project management, progress billing, and construction accounting, with a deep integration into Intuit's QuickBooks that has made the company a fixture in the small-business finance ecosystem.
We're actually building something that helps small businesses. When I hear one of our customers say, 'I didn't even know how we were managing before Knowify,' that's exciting.Marc Visent, on what keeps him going
An unusual set of tools
What makes Visent effective is less a single talent than an unusual combination of them. He trained first as a computer engineer at Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, then took a law degree at Universitat de Barcelona, and later earned an MBA at NYU's Stern School of Business after moving to New York. Engineering, law, business - three disciplines that rarely sit in one founder, and all three show up in how Knowify is run.
That background explains why Visent is not a hands-off chief executive. Alongside setting strategy and managing the team, he stays close to the product itself, supporting development and design. It is a rare posture for a CEO more than a decade into a company, and it keeps him tethered to the details of a domain - construction finance - that punishes anyone who treats it casually.
Before Knowify, Visent worked as a product manager at Patrina, a company that built compliant archiving software for the financial services industry. It was unglamorous, exacting work - the kind that teaches you how regulated businesses actually keep their records. When he and de Roulet turned their attention to construction in 2012, that instinct for the operational plumbing of a business carried over.
Why construction, and why now
The premise behind Knowify is simple and a little stubborn: small builders deserve the same financial clarity that large firms take for granted. Big construction companies have enterprise systems and finance departments. A three-person electrical contractor has a truck, a phone, and a shoebox of receipts. Visent set out to close that gap without asking contractors to become accountants.
The bet has paid off slowly and then, more recently, all at once. In 2025, Knowify was named to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, ranking No. 1,696 on the strength of 258% growth over three years. It is the kind of number that does not come from a viral launch but from thousands of contractors quietly deciding, one at a time, that they will not go back to the old way.
I am excited about the opportunity to make a difference in our industry as the future of bookkeeping and SaaS solutions evolves.Marc Visent, on joining Intuit's U.S. Partner Council, 2022
A seat at Intuit's table
In April 2022, Intuit appointed Visent to its U.S. Partner Council, an advisory board of nine members drawn from across the small-business software world. The council meets to shape product strategy and to weigh in on the future of bookkeeping and accounting tools. For a company Knowify's size, it was a notable vote of confidence - recognition that the platform had become genuinely useful to the contractors and bookkeepers who live inside QuickBooks every day.
Influence, in Visent's case, seems to follow usefulness rather than noise. Knowify does not chase attention. It builds the software contractors open first thing every morning and stop thinking about because it works. That is a harder thing to achieve than it sounds, and it is the standard he appears to hold the product to.
How he thinks about leadership
Visent has been open about the mechanics of running a company in a demanding, low-margin industry. Appearing on The Cost Codes Show, Knowify's own video series, he discussed what it means to "lead like a CEO" in construction - hiring people who are better than you, building accountability through transparency, and holding the tension between a long-term vision and the invoice that is due on Friday. The advice is unshowy, which fits the man giving it.
It also reflects the company's mission, which Visent frames not as disruption but as relief: to help trade contractors embrace technology and simplify the administrative work so business owners can get back to what they love doing. The most telling measure of success, for him, is not a metric on a dashboard. It is a customer saying they can no longer imagine how they ran the business before.
What comes next
Knowify has raised roughly $12 million over its life, with its most recent round reported in 2023, and it continues to expand its footprint among trade contractors across the United States and beyond. The construction industry is slowly, unevenly digitizing, and companies like Knowify are riding that shift - turning field notes, receipts and change orders into structured, real-time financial pictures.
Visent, for his part, appears content to keep building in the same deliberate way he always has: close to the code, close to the customer, and unbothered by the fact that the most valuable software is often the kind nobody talks about. Thirteen years in, that patience looks less like modesty and more like strategy.