TRAYD

Fixing the messiest paycheck in America

Every Friday, in back offices across the United States, someone reconciles a payroll that should not be possible to run by hand. A single crew might span three states, two unions, four wage rates and one federal prevailing-wage job with its own paperwork. Miss a form and a contractor can be disqualified from the next bid. Get a rate wrong and the money is either short or over - both a problem. For decades, the answer was spreadsheets, a shoebox of time cards and a very long afternoon.

Trayd, a New York company founded in 2021, was built to end that afternoon. It calls itself a back-office operating system for specialty trade contractors: one platform that runs payroll, HR, compliance, scheduling and real-time labor tracking for the electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, carpenters and excavators who make up the bulk of the construction workforce. The pitch is specific rather than sweeping - Trayd does not try to be software for everyone in construction. It is software for the person who has to make payroll happen.

The headline result is easy to remember. Trayd says it has cut average weekly payroll processing from 14 hours to 27 minutes - a figure the company frames as roughly a 31x productivity gain, or nearly two full working days handed back to a back-office team every week.

One platform, four hard jobs

Trayd bundles what most contractors cobble together from a payroll provider, a scheduling tool, a time-tracking app and a filing cabinet. The modules are built to share the same data, so a clock-in on a phone becomes a labor cost, a payroll line and a compliance record without anyone re-keying it.

Two days a week, returned

The clearest way to see Trayd's value is the payroll clock. What used to swallow the better part of two workdays now fits inside a coffee break.

That efficiency compounds into growth the company can point to: revenue up more than 600% year over year, a team that expanded from six people to roughly two dozen, and tens of millions of payroll dollars processed weekly for several hundred contractors.

The 400-to-1 customer

Trayd's central market observation is a ratio: for every general contractor, there are roughly 400 specialty trade contractors. Yet most legacy construction software was designed for the general contractor at the top of the project. The specialty subs - the far larger population, and the ones running the most punishing payroll - were left with generalist tools that were never built for their rules.

Trayd's customers sit squarely in that gap: firms ranging from a handful of employees to 40-plus, across trades like structural steel, excavation and mechanical work. Named clients include Titan Structural Group, M. O'Connor Contracting, Tompkins Excavating, United General Contractors and Wohl Diversified Services.

Workers benefit too. Trayd unlocks earned wage access - same-day pay - that gets construction workers their money an estimated 7 to 10 days sooner than legacy payroll providers, a meaningful lever in an industry where retention is a daily fight.

Why not ADP or Paychex?

Trayd competes on two fronts. Against generalist giants like ADP and Paychex, its argument is depth: construction pay is not a special case to be configured around, it is the starting point. Union deductions, prevailing wage, certified payroll and multi-state complexity are native, not add-ons. Against newer contractor-focused entrants such as Miter and Lumber, Trayd's argument is breadth - payroll, HR, compliance, scheduling and field tracking in a single system rather than a point tool.

The company also leans on service and pricing as differentiators, marketing transparent, no-hidden-fee pricing tied to payroll volume so cost scales with a contractor's workforce and project activity.

Where the depth actually lives

Trayd sells software the way its customers get paid: usage tied to work done. Pricing scales with payroll volume and workforce size, so a contractor's cost rises with headcount and project activity rather than with a flat enterprise seat count. The company markets that as transparent and free of hidden fees - a deliberate contrast with the surprise charges contractors often associate with legacy providers. Practically, it positions Trayd as a replacement for a payroll vendor plus a stack of point tools, which is where much of its value case comes from.

The expertise is less visible but harder to copy. Certified payroll, Davis-Bacon prevailing wage and union deductions are not features that can be bolted on late - they touch every calculation, every classification and every report. Trayd's edge is that it treats these as the core of the product, encoding the rules that vary by state, trade, union and project into a system that produces audit-ready documentation automatically. For a contractor, the payoff is concrete: a missed or mis-filed compliance form can disqualify a firm from a public project, so getting it right the first time protects the next bid, not just the current payroll run.

That domain focus also shapes the mobile side. Field and foreman apps are built for people who do not sit at desks - geolocation clock-ins, daily shift reports and auto-captured wage rates that turn raw jobsite activity into clean payroll and cost data without a second entry.

Built by someone who grew up on site

Trayd was co-founded by Anna Berger and Cara Kessler. Berger, the CEO, grew up in a construction family - her father is an architect - and watched firsthand how the back office drowned in manual work. She is a repeat founder; before Trayd she co-founded Curtn, a consumer social platform backed by Sam Altman, and she is a Y Combinator alum. Kessler, the CTO, spent about a decade at LinkedIn leading web platform engineering before turning that experience toward contractors.

The pairing - industry empathy plus big-tech engineering rigor - is part of why the company describes its mission plainly: to digitize construction payroll and the back office in order to power a better financial future for subcontractors and their workers.

A Series A closed in three weeks

Trayd's funding path is short and fast. In February 2025 it raised a $4.5M seed round led by Suffolk Technologies, the venture arm of Suffolk Construction, with Bloomberg Beta and Y Combinator. In March 2026 it added a $10M Series A led by White Star Capital, with Suffolk and Y Combinator following on and real estate developer RXR joining as a strategic investor. Total funding stands at about $15M. Notably, the Series A came together in roughly three weeks - unusually quick for a construction-tech round - with Y Combinator re-upping.

A $260 billion problem

The backdrop is enormous. The US construction market generates roughly $2 trillion a year, and Trayd points to about $260 billion in payroll flowing through the ecosystem annually - much of it still processed by hand. That combination - a huge, essential, under-digitized industry with genuinely hard compliance requirements - is why investors and contractors alike describe the opportunity as one of the last great openings in vertical software. Trayd's bet is that industry-specific depth, not generalist scale, wins it.

• CEO Anna Berger grew up in a construction family; her father is an architect.
• Berger previously co-founded Curtn, a social app backed by Sam Altman.
• Co-founder Cara Kessler spent about a decade leading web platform engineering at LinkedIn.
• Specialty trade contractors outnumber general contractors roughly 400 to 1.
• The $10M Series A came together in about three weeks.

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