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Architectural model at home construction site

Adaptive builds automation tools to speed up construction payments

2024-08-29

Architectural model at home construction site

Image Credits: Hans Hansen / Getty Images

The construction industry has a slow payments problem. Studies have found that it takes anywhere from two to three months on average for construction companies to get paid, due to factors such as delays, multiple payment layers and cost overruns.

The cost of sluggish construction contract payments climbed to $273 billion in 2023, representing 14% of the total project expenditures that year.

Matthew Calvano, along with Henry Bradlow and Francisco Enriquez, thought that the cause laid in back-office inefficiencies. So in 2021, the trio co-founded Adaptive, a platform that provides tools designed to simplify payments and accounting for general construction contractors.

“The construction payment chain involves multiple layers, including banks, developers, general contractors and subcontractors,” Calvano told TechCrunch. “We believe that this complex web, combined with the fact that most construction companies are small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) lacking financial expertise, are the primary drivers of the industry’s slow payments.”

Adaptive, which this week closed a $19 million Series A round led by Emergence Capital, delivers an array of workflow automations for financial management, including budgeting, expense tracking, accounts payable and electronic payments. Using Adaptive’s product, customers can upload documents like insurance agreements and payment requests in formats such as SMS and PDF and leverage automations to take action on these uploads, like approving requests and budgets.

“We’ve built several generative AI algorithms to automate the financial management and bookkeeping workflows unique to construction,” Calvano said. “Our primary competitor is the manual labor required to manage financials, typically supported by email, Excel, file sharing and the financial features of legacy project management software.

Adaptive’s other rivals include Briq, a startup with a similar financial workflow automation sales pitch; Beam, a fintech aiming to streamline payments, invoices and receipts for contractors; and MakersHub, which deciphers accounts payable data for construction companies.

But Adaptive has a healthy business by all appearances, with more than 280 construction companies on its customer roster ranging from custom homebuilders and commercial general contractors to real estate developers.

The near-term plan for growth is to focus on acquiring subcontractor clients by building tailored products for that segment, Calvano said. Medium-term, Adaptive — which makes all of its revenue through software at present — will explore monetizing different integrated payments, insurance and payroll functions, according to Calvano.

“Given that we manage our customers’ entire financial workflows, there are numerous opportunities for embedded finance, especially with our focus on SMBs that tend to be underserved when it comes to financial services,” Calvano said.

Andreessen Horowitz, Definition, Exponent, 3kvc, Box Group and Gokul Rajaram also participated in Adaptive’s Series A, which brings the startup’s total raised to $26.4 million. A portion of the proceeds will be put toward expanding New York-based Adaptive’s workforce from 29 to 45 by the end of the year, Calvano tells TechCrunch.

Test automation platform Tricentis acquires SeaLights

2024-08-29

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Olemedia / Getty Images

Tricentis, the well-funded test automation platform that helps developers find bugs in their code (now with the help of AI, of course), today announced that it has acquired SeaLights, a startup that makes the automated testing process more efficient by focusing only on the code that has changed.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but it’s worth noting that SeaLights, which was founded in 2015, raised a total of $50 million, including a $30 million Series A round in 2021. The company’s investors include Red Dot Capital, Deutsche Bank, Translink Capital, Shasta Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Cisco Investments, TLV Partners and Wipro Ventures.

“We are thrilled to join forces with Tricentis, the leader in continuous testing and quality engineering,” said SeaLights CEO and co-founder Eran Sher, who will join Tricentis as EVP and general manager, Quality Intelligence. “This acquisition marks a significant milestone in our journey, enabling us to expand our reach and impact. Together, we will transform the way organizations approach software quality, making it more intelligent, efficient, and reliable. Our combined expertise will drive the next generation of quality intelligence, setting a new standard for the industry.”

At its core, SeaLights continuously checks if any code has changed and maps tests to those changes. Using machine learning, the company’s platform then also tries to quantify how risky those changes are and ensures that the new code is covered by a testing solution.

Tricentis will integrate these capabilities to provide its users with what it calls “AI-enabled quality intelligence,” including test impact analysis, quality risk management and root cause analysis.

“Tricentis pioneered the quality intelligence category with robust coverage for SAP environments, and the additional capabilities of SeaLights further extends the dominance of our comprehensive quality intelligence solutions to a wide array of applications and environments,” said Tricentis CEO Kevin Thompson.

This marks Tricentis’ seventh acquisition. It’s last acquisition was Waldo, which the company announced last July.

GovWell is bringing automation and efficiency to local governments

2024-08-29

by admin with No Comment Tech

GovWell, startups, venture capital

Image Credits: GovWell

Government websites aren’t known for cutting-edge tech. GovWell co-founder and CTO Ben Cohen discovered this while trying to help his dad, a contractor, apply for building permits. Cohen worked as a full stack engineer at Uber during the day and faxed documents for building permits at night. The difference in tech was stark. Years later, this experience inspired him to launch GovWell.

New York-based GovWell is a workflow system for small and medium-sized governments that helps automate and streamline tasks ranging from building permits and code to zoning to fire safety inspections. GovWell co-founder and CEO Troy LeCaire told TechCrunch that the platform is helping local governments complete tasks in a fraction of the time it used to take.

LeCaire added that every government runs these processes a little differently, so GovWell’s platform was designed in a way that allows governments to customize it to their requirements without having to pay for a bespoke platform.

“It’s a single product that can be configured by no-code tools to make the software adapt perfectly to what it needs to do,” LeCaire said. “A good example is something like Salesforce — it can be configured to adapt to different businesses, but under the hood, it is the same process.”

LeCaire and Cohen were matched through a founder speed-dating activity at Fractal Software, a New York-based startup incubator. They realized that they both had experience with government, Cohen’s with his dad and LeCaire’s with political campaigns and a college degree in the subject. They first set out to build a software that automated building permits but quickly realized the problem was larger than that.

“We called hundreds of municipalities and asked them what [software] they were using and if they liked it, and we found that people didn’t like it despite paying thousands if not millions for it,” LeCaire said. “We realized that government needed a more general workflow solution.”

GovWell landed five government customers before the founders had written a line of code. Now, since its launch in April 2023, GovWell works with more than a dozen local governments ranging from parks departments to health departments across seven states.

The company raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Work-Bench with participation from existing investor Bienville Capital. LeCaire said that the company didn’t need to raise money and is on a path toward positive cash flow. They decided to raise because there was inbound investor interest and the company had the ability to set its own terms to accelerate growth. GovWell will use the money to triple the team in the next 18 months and invest in product development.

GovWell isn’t the only company looking to bring government software into the 21st century. A handful of startups, like GovDash, Hazel and Odo, are also looking to bring better software to the government contract space. There are some that focus on government workflow too. OpenGov is one. It’s a digital cloud software provider for governments that raised $178 million in venture funding before being acquired by Cox Enterprises earlier this year. GovPilot is another.

LeCaire said even with other software players, there isn’t competition in this sector like there is in AI or B2B SaaS.

“The scale of the problem is enormous,” LeCaire said. “Government expenditures is 36% of GDP. Local governments spend $1.8 trillion administering services. It’s a huge sector of the economy. Their adoption of AI, it is a massive market that touches everyone’s lives, the education system, and economic and community development.”

LeCaire said that while people don’t think of local governments as being big adopters of new tech — which isn’t entirely wrong — this area is different because these organizations are already spending quite a bit of money on it. GovWell hopes it can become that go-to provider.

“Our goal is to become the number one workflow automation for smaller and medium-sized local governments over the next 18 months,” LeCaire said. “What we are doing here, it is a unifying idea that, hey, government should work better. We all pay taxes. We all want our government to be efficient and effective to use.”

GovWell is bringing automation and efficiency to local governments

2024-07-30

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: GovWell

“It’s a single product that can be configured by no-code tools to make the software adapt perfectly to what it needs to do,” LeCaire said. “A good example is something like Salesforce – it can be configured to adapt to different businesses, but under the hood, it is the same process.”

LeCaire and Cohen were matched through a founder speed dating activity at Fractal Software, a New York-based startup incubator. They realized that they both had experience with government, Cohen’s with his dad, and LeCaire’s with political campaigns and a college degree in the subject. They first set out to build a software that automated building permits but quickly realized the problem was larger than that.

GovWell raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Work-Bench with participation from existing investor Bienville Capital. LeCaire said that the company didn’t need to raise money, and is on a path toward positive cash flow. They decided to raise because there was inbound investor interest and the company had the ability to set its own terms to accelerate growth. GovWell will use the money to triple the team in the next 18 months and invest in product development.

GovWell isn’t the only company looking to bring government software into the 21st century. A handful of startups, like GovDash, Hazel and Odo are also looking to bring better software to the government contract space. There are some that focus on government workflow too. OpenGov is one. It’s a digital cloud software provider for governments that raised $178 million in venture funding before being acquired by Cox Enterprises earlier this year. GovPilot is another.

LeCaire said even with other software players there isn’t competition in this sector like there is in AI or B2B SaaS.

LeCaire said that while people don’t think of local governments as being big adopters of new tech – which isn’t entirely wrong – this area is different because these organizations are already spending quite a bit of money on it. GovWell hopes it can become that go-to provider.