I’m thrilled to share that we’ve raised USD $3.2 million to accelerate our mission to build the AI-native operating system for construction. The round is led by White Star Capital with participation from One Way Ventures, Desjardins Capital, asterX, and Formentera Capital.
This milestone is more than a funding round. It’s the closing of one chapter and the bold beginning of another. To truly understand where we're going, it's important to look back at where we started.
Genesis
Two years ago, Billdr was a completely different company. When we started Billdr, we believed that homeowners needed a better way to plan and manage large-scale home renovations. For three and a half years (2020-2023), we operated a home-improvement marketplace connecting homeowners with vetted general contractors (GCs) across Montreal, Toronto and Chicago. We served thousands of homeowners, supported close to 100 small and medium construction businesses along the way.
But the truth was clear: the business model of a managed home improvement marketplace was excruciating to scale from a unit economics perspective.
In building that marketplace, we learned a lot about GCs’ day-to-day operations. In parallel to long hours on a construction site, they were drowning in manual work and disconnected tools running their administrative tasks. At the root causes of margin pressure are often the loss of information and the lack of automation within the back office. Marketplaces couldn’t fix that adequately without an advanced software layer.
So in the summer of 2023, we made the hardest decision of our journey so far: we pivoted from being a marketplace to building a vertical SaaS platform for SMB general contractors (residential GCS, commercial GCs and home builders).
Crossing the desert moment
Turning the business around was brutal. We had to lay off 80% of our team (~30 people) and rebuild everything from the ground up with the remaining 10 employees. We went months facing investor rejections and a dwindling runway. There were nights when it wasn’t clear we’d make it through. But we refused to quit. We believed construction didn’t need another point-solution software: construction needs an entirely new modern, intuitive and AI operating system aggregating all tools under one roof for GCs. And we rebuilt Billdr on that conviction.
For the last two years, we focused on building software, one feature at a time. We gained trust from GCs, one customer at a time. Today, we serve several hundred GCs businesses across the US and Canada representing thousands of construction professionals interacting with our software on a daily basis. Over $1B worth of quotes are being sent annually on the Billdr platform. Thousands of construction workers interact and use our software or mobile application on a monthly basis. We have a huge responsibility to build better software that makes GCs life easier in the back office.
In 2025, we hit profitability for the first time. That moment changed everything. For the first time, we felt the pull of genuine product-market fit. We weren’t chasing customers anymore; they were chasing us.
The core belief that drives us
SMB General contractors don't need more tools.
SMB GCs need one modern, intuitive, AI-native operating system that brings together estimating, project management (scheduling, to-dos, change orders, POs and more), team management, payments, communications, and procurement under one roof. That’s what we’re building.
Billdr is becoming the centralized brain of construction helping SMB GCs manage every aspect of their back office with clarity, speed, and intelligence.
There are 1.4M SMB GCs in North America, delivering $1T+ in construction projects annually (residential and commercial). Yet, 75% of SMB GCs still rely on spreadsheets and WhatsApp to run multimillion-dollar operations: we’re seeing a large opportunity to unlock productivity. We aim to make GCs businesses more profitable by lowering costs of handling the paperwork and by building tools that will help GCs save time running the admin part of their business and instead spend more time acquiring and serving more customers.
Looking ahead
This new round of funding gives us the fuel to scale what’s working and execute on several key initiatives in the coming year.
Over the next 12 months, we will accelerate our product velocity in the following areas:
- Roll out a suite of AI workflows for estimating, scheduling, and communications.
- Build out our payments infrastructure to help GCs manage cash flow and pay vendors seamlessly.
- Launch our native iOS and Android apps, bringing the full power of Billdr to the jobsite.
By the end of 2026, our goal is for Billdr to be the unified, AI-native OS that helps GCs scale effortlessly from a one-person operation to a 60-person construction company.
Thank you to the Billdr community
The Billdr community has been the heartbeat of this journey.
Our growth over the past year has been driven almost entirely by word-of-mouth, GCs sharing Billdr with other GCs, an entire community of modern GCs helping us improve with their feedback and ideas.
We’re incredibly proud to have become the platform of choice for hundreds of SMB GCs across North America: from one-person operations to growing teams building millions in annual revenue.
To our customers, Billdr exists to serve you. The work you do on the construction site is hard, Billdr is here to make the work in the office easy. We’ll keep listening, we’ll keep building, and we’ll keep earning your trust with the most intuitive construction software your team can be proud of.
We’re just getting started. It’s time to build :)
Bertrand Nembot | Co-founder & CEO, Billdr
To our investors, thank you. Special thanks to Lex Z. at One Way Ventures & Pelra A. at Asterx, you believed in our team early, even after we made the decision to rethink our strategic direction: we couldn’t have reached product-market fit without your irrational belief in us. Thank you to Sanjay Z. at White Star Capital, you’ve been a thoughtful partner to me for years before this investment, helping me rethink the approach to solving the digitization of the construction industry: excited to have you join our Board! Thank you to David P. at Desjardins Capital for taking a bet on us earlier than usual. Thank you to Jean-Nicolas G. and Cherif H. at Formentera Capital for the thoughtful and straightforward feedback since the earliest days of this company, you’ve helped me mature as a CEO. Thank you to Julian S. at Julian Capital for your GTM insights and thoughtful words of encouragement. Thank you to all our angel investors, it takes a village to bring a vision like this one to life.
Billdr PRO is the modern operating system for SMB general contractors. Our AI-native software helps GCs estimate, schedule, and manage projects from a single platform: saving time, reducing errors, and scaling their business efficiently. Learn more at billdr.ai.
