Trayd Raises $10M Series A to Modernize Payroll for Construction Industry

Construction payroll doesn’t fail loudly. It drags. It lingers. It eats hours in the background while the real work happens out in the field. Clipboards, spreadsheets, late nights, and someone double checking numbers like their sanity depends on it. 14 hours a week just to make sure people get paid right. Not glamorous. Not scalable. Definitely not built for a world that moves faster than a concrete pour in July.

Anna Berger saw that mess up close. Not from a pitch deck, but from lived proximity to the grind. So Anna Berger built Trayd, and alongside Cara Kessler, engineered something that doesn’t just process payroll, it respects time. And in construction, time is money’s older, meaner sibling.

Now Trayd just locked in $10M in Series A funding, led by White Star Capital, with Suffolk Technologies and Y Combinator running it back, and RXR stepping in with strategic weight. That’s not just a cap table, that’s a signal. The people who build cities are finally getting software that understands how they actually work.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Trayd takes payroll from 14 hours down to 27 minutes. Read that again slowly. That’s not optimization. That’s a category correction. When you compress time like that, you don’t just save effort, you unlock capacity. Contractors stop babysitting spreadsheets and start seeing their business in real time. Labor, costs, compliance, all lined up without the usual friction.

And this isn’t some generic SaaS dressed up in work boots. Trayd leans into the complexity. Union rules, prevailing wage, multi state tax headaches, certified payroll. The stuff most platforms politely avoid. That’s where they live. That’s where they win.

There’s a bigger play hiding in plain sight. Specialty contractors outnumber general contractors by a landslide, yet they’ve been running on tools that feel like they were built when fax machines were still considered innovation. Trayd isn’t chasing the spotlight. It’s wiring up the backbone.

The lesson here is clean. If you want to earn serious capital, go where the problems are dense, expensive, and ignored. Anna Berger and Cara Kessler didn’t simplify the problem. They embraced it, mapped it, and turned it into leverage.