Today we’re announcing our $20M Series B round led by Fifth Wall. You’re welcome to read the press release — for now, we wanted to share why this is an important milestone in the world of construction field productivity and business management through technology.
First, let’s frame the conversation: construction has been in a productivity crisis for years, and subcontractors and self-perform GCs are taking on more risk than ever with each new project.
Contractors are facing more complexity in their operations and dwindling margins, with challenges like the skilled labor shortage, rising equipment and material costs, and tightening compliance requirements. Large projects often take an astounding 20% longer to finish than scheduled and exceed budgets by up to 80%. And, while economic productivity has risen overall, construction labor productivity has failed to keep up entirely.
Technology will pull contractors out of this productivity lag, but there are notable issues: the construction industry continues to lag in tech adoption and, at the same time, most software isn’t built to help manage construction businesses themselves. What’s worse, over one-third of contractors that have failed tech initiatives indicate that it is due to poor product fit; the solutions on the market aren’t solving the real issues in their businesses.
Our Co-Founders, Sean McCreanor and Marko Tomic, recognized the increasing limitations and the tech gap for horizontal subcontractors and self-perform GCs. They started building Assignar in 2014 to tie together these often overlooked, critical components of a construction business and drive efficiency throughout the office and field. Today, we’re simplifying operations for our customers across the globe through connected scheduling, crew & equipment management, production rates, timekeeping, safety, quality, maintenance and more. By tackling these common challenges through digitization and connectivity, our customers can tighten their grip on their operations, make better business decisions, and scale.
Prioritizing our customers and the industry
Results-oriented
Whether they pour concrete, build roads, excavate, and so on, our customers sit at the core of everything we do. We’ll continue to drive quantifiable results for our customers by solving impactful challenges they face in the office and field. In the seven years since our founding, we’ve helped our customers save tens of thousands each year in administrative tasks like payroll and scheduling.
OE Construction, an excavation and utility contractor in Golden, Colorado, embraced Assignar as part of their strategy to future-proof their business. Terri Olson, Co-Owner and CFO, said “we can prove that we have been able to save, just in the timesheet reporting alone, over $30,000 a year. And then you take that and add on all the other data that we’re collecting in the forms, and that translates to savings of $50,000 or $60,000 for a coordinator position, that we’re now able to accomplish with technology. These were immediate benefits we saw in the first year.”
Australian civil contractor, RCC Civil also digitized their paper-based manual processes with Assignar and was able to reduce payroll admin by 93%. Belinda Hyett, Business Development Manager at RCC Civil reflected on their savings, highlighting that “in regards to payroll…doing the wages has gone from a 3-day process in chasing things, getting emails and all the data entry to now 1 hour and 20 minutes.”
We’re humbled to play a role in making our customers’ lives easier. By reducing administrative tasks and other redundancies, our customers can effectively execute more work and build more.
Feedback-focused
Results are one of the components that will continue to guide the future of the Assignar platform, the other is feedback. Over the years, our customers’ consistent feedback has helped to elevate the solutions we bring to the industry and bridge the gap in the market. In 2020 alone, we shipped over 110 customer ideas into our platform to improve usability, user experience, and functionality. This round of investment will help us to continue to prioritize that feedback, and better serve our customers and the construction industry through substantial investment in research and development.
There are also exciting new initiatives you’ll want to keep an eye out for, including AI and machine learning to support planning and execution processes, more robust and powerful features and tools to assist in visibility and granularity, all in the same, intuitive interface our customers know.
The journey continues
We’re keen to keep the momentum going, bringing modern, easy-to-use software to a tenacious industry and helping contractors to deliver a better built world. It’s time for subcontractors and self-perform GCs to get ahead with an operations platform that was built for them, making productivity, profitability, safety, and quality in the field and office more easily attainable.
We’re looking forward to the continuous development and improvement of our platform and solutions for the construction industry with the collaboration of our talented team, dedicated customers, and the outstanding support of our investors, Fifth Wall, Ironspring Ventures, Our Innovation Fund (OIF) and Tola Capital.
If you’re interested in joining our mission, check out our careers page.
Our Story: customer-obsessed since day one