Miter Raises $40M to Build Construction Operating System

One hour on a construction job can carry more obligations than most business software was designed to hold. The worker, pay rate, union agreement, prevailing-wage rule, tax jurisdiction, cost code and project budget may all need the same hour to mean something different, and they still have to reconcile before payroll closes.

Miter has raised a $40M Series B to make those records move together. Battery Ventures led the September 30, 2026 financing, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Coatue participating. Miter says the round brings its total capital raised to $78M.

The financing gives the San Francisco company more room to expand from construction payroll and workforce management into a wider operating system for contractors. Miter plans to invest in AI products for the back office and jobsite, grow engineering teams in San Francisco and New York and add to its U.S. go-to-market organization.

What Miter's $40M Series B Funds

The funding announcement describes a platform that now spans payroll, HR, compliance, expense management, field operations, accounts payable, safety and job costing. The operating thesis is straightforward: contractors should not have to move the same worker, project and cost data through a collection of disconnected applications before anyone can trust the result.

Miter says its AI already parses information from invoices, receipts and pay-rate tables, automates workflows previously completed by hand and surfaces labor and job-cost trends while a project is active. In the field, the company says the software can turn photos or voice notes into safety reports and summarize job status from information across the platform. The next product phase is intended to push those capabilities deeper into the contractor's financial and operational work.

The company also plans to hire more engineers in San Francisco and New York. Its commercial expansion will run across the United States, where construction firms face different combinations of state taxes, union agreements, prevailing-wage requirements, certified payroll reports and safety obligations.

Why Construction Payroll Becomes an Operating System

Payroll is an unusually demanding entry point into construction software because it forces the platform to understand both people and projects. A conventional payroll system can calculate wages and taxes. A construction system also has to understand where the employee worked, which job and cost code received the labor, whether union or prevailing-wage rules apply, how fringes are treated and what the contractor must report.

That same information matters beyond the paycheck. Project managers need current labor costs. Finance teams need the books to reconcile. Compliance staff need defensible records. Field leaders need a workflow that does not ask crews to enter the same fact several times. When the systems disagree, the problem can reach a worker, a regulator and a project margin before management sees one clean report.

Miter's product expansion follows that chain. Time tracking can feed payroll; payroll can feed job costing; worker and project data can inform compliance, expenses, safety and field reporting. The opportunity is not a larger software menu. It is one operational record that carries the same construction hour from the field into finance without losing its context.

The Founders Learned the Problem From the Inside

Miter was founded in 2021 by Connor Watumull, its CEO, and Tobin Paxton, its COO. Their origin story gives the product thesis more texture than a standard software market map.

Paxton has described watching his mother, a bookkeeper, work through payroll around Thanksgiving and realizing how much manual effort remained inside supposedly modern systems. Watumull spent time working with a construction bookkeeping firm to learn certified payroll, union rules and prevailing-wage requirements. The two later visited Bay Area contractors, watched finance teams do the work and decided the problem was large enough to build around for decades.

That matters because construction software is full of edge cases that are only edges from the vendor's perspective. To a contractor, a crew crossing a state line, a new union agreement, a corrected timecard or a public-project reporting rule is ordinary work. Miter's advantage depends on converting that ordinary complexity into product behavior without flattening the judgment finance and field teams still need.

Miter's Reported Growth and Customer Base

Miter reports more than 2,000 contractors and 150,000 users on its platform, with more than $8.5B in payroll processed annually. The company also says roughly 2 of every 100 U.S. construction workers are now paid through Miter and that customers manage hundreds of thousands of active jobs through the platform each month.

Those figures are company-reported rather than independently audited, but the direction is consistent with Miter's prior financing record. When Bessemer and Coatue co-led a $38M financing in May 2025, Bessemer said the platform served more than 700 contractors. Miter now says customer count tripled over the following 18 months. The current release names Clayco and Haugland Group among its customers, spanning major design-build work and infrastructure services.

No valuation or revenue figure was disclosed with the Series B. That leaves the clearest public evidence in customer adoption, product expansion and the decision by existing investors to participate alongside a new lead.

What Battery Ventures Is Underwriting

Battery Ventures is joining a cap table that already includes two large technology investors. Michael Brown, a Battery general partner who serves on Miter's board, framed the opportunity around construction's operational complexity and Miter's integrated product. The investment is a bet that construction-specific software can take on more of the back-office work that contractors still complete manually.

The timing is useful. Contractors are being asked to deliver data centers, housing, energy systems and public infrastructure while labor remains constrained and project economics remain unforgiving. Better software cannot create electricians, carpenters or ironworkers. It can reduce how much skilled operating attention is spent moving information between tools that were never designed to agree.

AI can accelerate that work when the system already understands the underlying record. An invoice parser is more useful when it knows the vendor, project and cost code. A safety summary is more valuable when it remains connected to the worker, job and underlying report. A labor trend matters when it reaches the project manager before the job closes.

The Reliability Obligation Grows With the Platform

Moving from payroll into a construction operating system expands both Miter's market and its obligation. Every new workflow adds useful context, but it also increases the number of decisions that depend on the platform being correct. Payroll, certified reports, safety records and job-cost data are not low-consequence places to improvise.

Miter's next stage will be measured by whether contractors can replace manual reconciliation without losing control of the exceptions that made the old process necessary. The company has the capital to build more product and reach more firms. The harder work is making every connection feel ordinary to the contractor whose week still ends with a crew to pay and a project margin to explain.