A civil engineer who kept getting stuck behind the wrong delivery truck, then wrote software so he wouldn't have to.
Richard Fifita is the co-founder and chief executive of Veyor, a Sydney-born, now Austin-headquartered piece of software that answers, in real time, a question construction sites have been mishandling for a century: whose truck goes to which dock at what time, and who has to move so it fits. Veyor closed a US$7.5 million Series A in March 2026, bringing its total capital raised to somewhere north of US$14 million, and Fifita moved his family to Texas to run the American expansion.
This is a company whose customers used to run their loading docks on a whiteboard and a group chat. The whiteboard was inaccurate by nine in the morning, and the group chat was silent by ten. The tower crane, meanwhile, was booked. So the concrete truck waited, the drywall truck waited, the elevator installer waited, and the general contractor absorbed the cost, which is a polite way of saying nobody knew what the cost actually was. Fifita, in a past life, was the person on site apologising for it.
He is Australian, of Tongan descent, a former Lendlease superintendent, and he helped deliver the Barangaroo International Towers - three glass rectangles at the western edge of Sydney's harbour that most people photograph without knowing the name of. In 2017 he stopped building the buildings and started building the software the buildings apparently needed. The pitch, as far as one can tell from talking to him and reading the last eight years of interviews, has never really changed: the industry is enormous, digital adoption is late, and a scheduling calendar that actually reflects reality is worth real money to the people paying for cranes by the hour.
What's interesting about Fifita is not that he raised a Series A. Lots of people raise a Series A. What's interesting is that he raised a Series A for logistics scheduling in construction, which is the kind of company venture capitalists usually pass on politely, and he did it by having been the person who suffered from the problem first. He calls the company, still, "a full time hobby."
"I don't treat Veyor like a job, but more so a full time hobby."- Richard Fifita, Balance The Grind
The story Fifita tells about starting Veyor is not the usual one. There is no coffee shop napkin, no eureka moment, no dorm room. He was a superintendent, which is the person on a construction site whose job is basically to make sure the physical universe agrees with the schedule. His universe, on the Barangaroo towers, did not agree with the schedule often enough. Deliveries were double-booked. Hoists were oversubscribed. The trade contractors who were supposed to be there at 7:30 were still parked on Sussex Street. The trade contractors who were not supposed to be there at 7:30 were parked at the gate.
The natural response to this is to complain about the industry, which he did, then get more disciplined about coordinating it, which he also did. The unnatural response is to write software. Fifita picked the unnatural response. Veyor's first version - deployed in 2018 on one of Sydney's tallest towers - was a booking calendar that treated the loading dock and the crane like conference rooms. From there it grew: driver inductions, boom gate integration, live traffic management, historical analytics on which trades chronically ran late.
The product now sells not only into construction but into facilities and events, which is a natural extension when you realise that "a lot of trucks arriving at the same place" is a universal problem. Owners of large real estate assets have started using it to run their loading docks year-round; venue operators use it to sequence in-loads and out-loads.
The Series A funds an American land-grab. The United States has more construction than anywhere else in the English-speaking world, and it also runs more of its logistics on paper than most Australian sites now do. Fifita has taken personally the task of translating an Australian-flavoured product into a US-flavoured sales cycle. He is doing this from an office in Austin, on North Lamar Boulevard.
"We take pride in delivering an excellent product, a great service and being the best at what we do. We care - for real - and we do things properly."- Richard Fifita, Veyor
Trains in the evenings to decompress. Then goes home and gets back on email around midnight, which suggests the decompression is only partial.
His rec basketball team, named after a Sydney sandwich shop. If a startup CEO's rec team is named after a sandwich shop, that is worth knowing.
Talks openly about how Pacific Island values - togetherness, looking out for the greater good rather than the individual self - inform how he thinks about company culture at Veyor.
Office by eight with a coffee. Sales stand-up. Client calls. Product strategy. Boxing. Then a second inbox session that runs late.
Pivot, a16z, Joe Rogan. A useful triangulation: the media guys, the venture guys, and the guy who talks to anyone.
Reports better energy and mental clarity since giving it up. A minor detail with an outsized effect on his workday, apparently.
There is a genre of founder that venture capital has slowly learned to take seriously: the person who worked in an industry for a decade, got frustrated, quit, and built the software they wanted to buy. It is not the coder who wonders what problem to solve. It is the operator who already knows.
Fifita fits neatly into this genre. He did not set out to be a technology executive. He set out to stop wasting his own afternoons at a construction site in Sydney. The product he built is not glamorous - it is a calendar with strong opinions about who can park where - but it earns its money because the alternative is a whiteboard, and the whiteboard is lying to you.
The Series A round is a bet on a specific thing: that this founder, in this vertical, in the United States, can turn a well-loved Australian product into a well-loved American one. The bet is not really that construction is going digital. Construction has been "going digital" for twenty years. The bet is that construction is finally being sold to by people who know what a delivery run sheet looks like.
Fifita is one of those people. He also happens to be running a company from Austin, boxing on weeknights, and describing the whole enterprise as a hobby he refuses to put down. Whether this is the healthiest way to run a startup is a separate question. Whether it is a productive way to run one is answered, at the moment, by the cap table.
He's the CEO and co-founder of Veyor Digital, a construction and facilities logistics scheduling platform. Before Veyor he was a civil engineer and site superintendent, including work at Lendlease on Sydney's Barangaroo International Towers.
It coordinates who and what shows up at a construction site, in what order. That means delivery bookings, crane and hoist scheduling, driver inductions, access control, boom gate integration and analytics on how the day actually went.
Austin, Texas, as of the 2026 Series A. He relocated from Sydney to run the US expansion personally.
Roughly US$14.25 million in total, most recently a US$7.5 million Series A in March 2026 led by Marbruck Investments.
Amateur boxing, rec basketball, family, and a stated commitment to Pacific Island values of collective wellbeing over individual advancement.