The billing software built for the trades - so subcontractors can stop chasing payments and start collecting them.
Here is a fact about construction that sounds made up but isn't: a subcontractor can finish steel erection on a hospital wing, do everything right, and still wait three months for the money. The building is done. The invoice is out. And the payment is sitting somewhere in a general contractor's approval queue, blocked - very possibly - by a single missing lien waiver.
Siteline is a San Francisco software company that decided this was a software problem rather than a patience problem. Founded in 2019, it sells billing software built for exactly one type of customer: the commercial trade contractor, otherwise known as the subcontractor. The plumbers, the glaziers, the drywall crews, the electricians - the companies that do the actual work on a jobsite and then have to fight to get paid for it.
The thing you have to understand about construction billing is that it is not like billing anywhere else. You do not send an invoice. You send a "pay application," which is a specific, formatted document that has to match precisely what the general contractor wants - and every general contractor wants something slightly different. Attached to that pay app is a lien waiver, a legal document in which you agree to give up your right to put a lien on the property in exchange for payment. There are conditional waivers and unconditional ones, progress waivers and final ones, and using the wrong one at the wrong time is the kind of mistake that delays a check by weeks.
Multiply that by dozens of active projects, each with its own GC, its own forms, its own deadlines, and its own lower-tier vendors who also need to submit waivers, and you arrive at the actual daily reality of a subcontractor's billing department: a spreadsheet, a stack of PDFs, and a lot of email. Siteline's bet is that this is software waiting to be written.
"The only billing software built for commercial subcontractors."
Siteline's own description of itselfSiteline's approach is to take every document that stands between a subcontractor and a paycheck and put it in one place. The company describes its platform as a central hub for pay apps, lien waivers, and "anything else that can impact payments." In practice, that breaks down into a handful of connected tools.
Generates, submits, and tracks pay applications precisely to each GC's specs - drawing on a library of 23,000+ forms from 17,000+ general contractors.
Digitizes waiver forms, collects digital signatures, and knows which waiver to generate and when - for both the contractor and its lower-tier vendors.
Visual reporting on invoice aging, current billing status, and which GCs pay fastest and slowest, with automated reminders and bulk requests.
Billing projections and cash flow forecasts across the life of a project, so finance teams can see what's coming instead of guessing.
Tracks lien deadlines and preliminary notice requirements by state to protect a subcontractor's right to get paid at all.
Tracks change orders and vendor compliance documents, closing the gaps where scope changes quietly turn into unpaid work.
The library of 23,000-plus forms is the part worth lingering on, because it is arguably the real moat. Anyone can build a nice dashboard. What is genuinely hard - and genuinely valuable - is knowing the exact pay app format that 17,000 different general contractors demand, and keeping all of them current. That is not a feature so much as a slowly accumulated data asset, and it is the sort of thing a competitor cannot simply clone over a weekend.
Figures are Siteline's own; bar widths are illustrative, not to a common scale.
Vertical software works when you actually understand the vertical, and Siteline's founding team is a deliberate mix of two worlds - fintech product and the jobsite - which is roughly the point.
A civil engineer who was a project manager at Tishman Construction in New York, where she worked on landmark jobs including Hudson Yards and JPMorgan's corporate headquarters. She has since taken over as CEO.
Helped conceive Apple Pay at Apple and was Stripe's first product manager, with earlier product work at Flipboard. Grew up around her father's construction company. Formerly CEO, now President.
A serial entrepreneur who previously founded timber.so and MyMiniLife, with prior company exits to both Google and Zynga. Leads Siteline's engineering.
Siteline has raised about $18.4 million, in the tidy two-step pattern that vertical SaaS companies tend to follow: a quiet seed round to prove the thing works, then a larger Series A to hire the people who sell it.
At the time of the Series A, Siteline said it was processing more than $180 million in annualized billing for customers - projects ranging from office campuses and schools to airport terminals and hospital wings. (Some data providers list total funding closer to $21.8M; the officially announced figure is $18.4M.)
Siteline's customers are commercial trade contractors across specialties - steel erectors, glaziers, drywall crews, mechanical and electrical firms. Named customers include Cooper Steel, Richards, Industrial Commercial Systems (ICS), Architectural Glass & Aluminum, Vallencourt Construction, and Washington Iron Works, among others. These are not household names, which is exactly the market: mid-sized, unglamorous, deeply operational businesses for whom cash flow is not an abstraction but the difference between making payroll and not.
The claimed 98% retention rate matters more here than a flashy logo would. In vertical SaaS, retention is the whole ballgame - it says the software became load-bearing, the kind of tool a billing department reorganizes itself around rather than something that gets quietly dropped at renewal. When a subcontractor tells Siteline they save days per week and get paid weeks faster, they tend to stay.
The tidy way to describe Siteline is "fintech for construction," and that is accurate but slightly misses what makes it interesting. Siteline is not trying to lend money or move payments itself. It is attacking the friction that sits around the payment - the forms, the waivers, the compliance, the endless matching of a subcontractor's paperwork to a general contractor's requirements. It is selling, in effect, the removal of an administrative tax that the whole industry has simply learned to live with.
That is a less exciting story than "we invented a new payment rail," and probably a more durable one. The form library grows every year. The retention compounds. And the founding team's split personality - Stripe and Apple Pay on one side, Tishman and Hudson Yards on the other - is a decent proxy for the two things you need to pull this off: knowing how modern software should feel, and knowing exactly why a lien waiver was rejected. Whether Siteline becomes the definitive system of record for subcontractor billing or one option among several, the underlying observation is hard to argue with. Construction is enormous, it still runs on PDFs, and someone was going to write the software eventually.
Product walkthroughs and demos live on Siteline's own site and channels. Start here.
Siteline is billing software built specifically for commercial trade contractors. It centralizes pay applications, lien waivers, compliance documents, accounts receivable reporting, and cash flow forecasting so subcontractors get paid faster.
Siteline was founded in 2019 by Claire Wilson, Gloria Lin, and Joel Poloney, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Siteline has raised about $18.4M, including a $3.4M seed round and a $15M Series A led by Menlo Ventures in February 2022. Some data providers list total funding closer to $21.8M.
Commercial trade and specialty subcontractors across trades like steel, glass, drywall, mechanical, and electrical. Named customers include Cooper Steel, Richards, ICS, Architectural Glass & Aluminum, and Vallencourt Construction.
Unlike broad construction platforms, Siteline is purpose-built for subcontractor billing, with a library of 23,000+ pay app and lien waiver forms from 17,000+ general contractors so paperwork matches each GC's exact requirements.