Trayd
inside the playbook of a breakout vertical SaaS company
Good morning,
Incredibly fun to sit down with Anna Berger, CEO of Trayd, to talk about construction payroll, job costing, and why there is still so much software left to build in 2025.
On paper, we live in an era of instant payments, modern payroll platforms, and a full stack of fintech primitives. In that world, you would assume payment delays are largely solved.
They are not.
The construction payment chain is still onerous, multi party, and frequently delayed. Roughly a quarter of GCs list payment delays as a major cause of project delays. A single late payment can add anywhere between one and three weeks to a job.
Underneath that sits the real control point: Labor.
Construction only happens if people get paid. As Anna likes to say, about seventy five percent of a contractor’s back office cost structure is payroll.
Once you hear that, payroll stops looking like a boring back office workflow. It starts to look like the singular control surface for most of the job’s economics. Whether people get paid on time, at the right rate, with the right benefits and the right compliance paperwork attached, determines whether the project keeps moving or quietly stalls.
The interesting question is what happens if you treat payroll not just as a cost to manage, but as the core data feed for job costing and bidding.
What if payroll is not only the gate on whether work continues, but the primary way to prevent late payments and blown jobs upstream? What if better labor analytics and real time tracking of labor spend can drive better bids and healthier margins for contractors?
Turns out that’s exactly what Trayd is doing.
The founding: starting at the hardest point
Anna did not wander into construction payroll due to a top-down market analysis.
She grew up in a construction family. She saw the stress of making payroll. She watched the guesswork around labor forecasting. She saw how hard it was to track the true cost of variable labor on real projects.
And despite it being fairly unsexy and plenty of naysayers, Anna and the team went to work.
For the first few years of Trayd, her job was not glamorous. She spent her time convincing contractors, unions, and back office teams that a startup could handle their most sensitive, heavily regulated workflow.
Two early product bets stand out.
First, Trayd built for workers and the complexity of making sure they were were paid fairly.
That meant embracing the full mess of construction payroll. Automated union deductions. Complex overtime and double time rules. Shift differentials. Benefit calculations that change by trade and geography. All the details that generic payroll pushes into a catchall “custom fields” bucket became first class objects in Trayd’s system.
Second, Trayd focused in on helping smaller and mid sized contractors compete with the back offices of national construction groups.
Federal and state infrastructure projects are booming. Bridges, tunnels, airports, offshore wind, stadiums, transit. These come with their own rulebook: prevailing wage requirements, certified payroll reports, and constant regulatory change.
For a lean back office, that is overwhelming. Trayd’s data model and workflows are tuned for this world. The system knows how to calculate prevailing wage, generate certified payroll, and keep up with an ever shifting compliance landscape. That lets contractors bid on projects that would previously feel out of reach or result in scaling back office complexity.
Those two bets are now compounding.
Trayd is growing roughly 500 percent year over year. And their customers see field teams grow on average around 265 percent after adopting Trayd while back office headcount stays flat.
A modern, construction specific payroll platform is already a solid business. The more interesting part is the wedge it creates. Once you own payroll, you are standing in the perfect spot to attack everything upstream of it: job costing, bidding, and project analytics.
Job costing: materials, labor, and where the real risk lives
If you think about construction naively, you can put a project into two buckets.
Materials.
Labor.
If you want to forecast the cost of a job or set a bid that does not blow you up later, you need to get both roughly right.
The industry has put a lot of energy into materials. Takeoffs, procurement, dynamic pricing, inventory. None of that is easy, but at least it feels countable.
Labor is where the real chaos lives.
Hourly rates per trade. Union contract components. Project type. Shift timing. Location. Benefits. Travel. Per diems. Hazard pay. A long list of rate modifiers that can all apply to a single shift.
Historically, nobody has modeled this cleanly at the level of an actual job. Horizontal payroll thinks in terms of a company, not a project. It runs biweekly or weekly cycles. The primary object is the employee, not the job site.
In construction, that is the wrong abstraction.
A contractor does not live inside “payroll for ACME Builders.” They live inside “this stadium expansion” or “this terminal roof” and whether those specific projects lose money or not.
Two bidders can assume nearly identical material costs and still have wildly different outcomes. The difference shows up in how labor actually plays out in the field. Did that night work run longer than expected. Did the mix of trades on a certain phase drive the effective hourly rate much higher than the estimate. Did overtime spiral out of control.
The firms that survive are usually not the ones squeezing an extra few percent out of materials pricing. They are the ones that understand the labor side of the equation in a grounded way.
That blind spot is the zone Trayd works in.
Trayd’s data model: labor as the core primitive
Matt Brown has a line I love. Data models are destiny.
Vertical tools serve specific industries with deep domain complexity. Leverage comes from what you choose to emphasize. Toast elevated menu items—not transactions—with prep times and kitchen routing as first-class data. Klaviyo promoted order data to equal status alongside email metrics.
Vertical tools are really just strong opinions about what should be first class in a system.Trayd applies that same philosophy to construction payroll.
Instead of treating “hours” as a generic field to multiply by a base rate, Trayd makes the full complexity of hourly work the center of the data model and ties it directly to the job site. Every question around who worked on what project, under what contract, with which rate modifiers becomes answerable.
And at that point, Trayd became a live data feed for construction labor.
From there, the analytics are straightforward to imagine. That stream becomes the foundation for real time job costing and for better future bids.
Every facet of the job site becomes queryable with the upside that the true cost of the job becomes verifiable.
And if you can determine the cost of a job, you can now forecast with greater precision than ever before.
This is where Trayd’s vertical depth and the true insight around focusing in on construction payroll really shows. It is not obvious at first glance that solving construction payroll compliance would unlock genuine labor analytics. But once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The same data model that keeps contractors compliant on certified payroll and union rules is the one that gives you a truthful view into the labor portion of every job.
Real projects and an ode to traditional software
Today, Trayd is running payroll for roofing crews at JFK Airport, crews on the new Buffalo Bills stadium, offshore windmill rigs, and plenty more.
People are clocking in and out on some of the most visible projects in the country and Trayd is the system that decides whether they get paid correctly and on time. The same system is quietly building a ledger of what those projects truly cost on the labor side. And again, prior to Trayd, there just wasn’t a truly great system of record and data model for the complexity here.
Which brings me to a broader point.
We are clearly in an AI era. Foundation models are getting better. Every week, there is a new demo of an autonomous workflow that looks and feels impressive. I am very long this shift.
At the same time, my thesis is that we are still going to see a large number of multibillion dollar vertical software vendors created in very traditional ways.
There is an enormous amount of software left to build.
There are industries where systems of record are weak, fragmented, or non existent. The database is still an Excel file, a filing cabinet, and a payroll export. In those environments, AI agents do not have anything solid to stand on. They cannot plan, price, or automate the way we want them to, because nobody has captured the underlying reality in a structured system.
Trayd is a reminder that the first job is often to build that system.
Once you do that, everything else becomes possible. Analytics. Better bidding. Smarter planning. Eventually, more automation. But it all starts with boring, serious software that earns the right to be in the loop.
I think of this as an ode to traditional software.
A focused product that picks an unglamorous but vital workflow in a huge industry. A data model that actually matches how that industry works. A founder who has been talking about the same problem for four years and is more excited now because the market has finally caught up.
Construction work stops when people do not get paid.
Trayd started there. It built upward from that simple insight into a real system of record for labor. Along the way, it turned payroll into a live readout of what is happening on job sites and gave contractors a clearer view of what their work costs in the real world.
In a world fixated on what agents might do someday, I think it is worth paying attention to the teams quietly rebuilding the core software those agents will eventually depend on. Trayd is one of them.