It’s been over three years since launching Clearstory, the first of its kind Change Order Communication Platform for the commercial construction industry. As I reflect on the last few years, I am incredibly grateful for our amazing customers and the talented team we are building. Before I get to additional reflection, I am presented with an opportunity to share some exciting news.
Today I’m proud to announce that Clearstory raised a $5.3 million Series A led by an exceptional partner in Jackson Square Ventures. This capital will help us expand our platform to better serve the commercial construction industry and continue to hire an amazing team to build, market, and sell Clearstory. We’re excited to expand our board with Jackson Square Ventures Venture Partner Uri Pomerantz and Founding Partner Bob Spinner as board observer.
Clearstory is on a mission to help Subcontractors, General Contractors, and Owners better communicate project costs between stakeholders. Why? Because construction accounting and project financial software is internal facing and not collaborative by design. As a result, project teams across the industry communicate more than $150 billion in Change Orders annually via emails, static PDF, and Excel logs, as well as track field-directed extra work on carbon copy paper.
As a former project manager myself with more than a decade of experience, I’ve seen firsthand how the lack of visibility causes financial risk, broken relationships, and unnecessary stress for project team members. With 40 or more Subcontractors on many of my projects, keeping tabs on Time and Material Tags and Change Order Requests sent by subcontractors was a full time job and the lack of real-time visibility is the primary reason projects ran over budget.
It was clear to me that traditional software products don’t understand what actually occurs daily on construction sites.
Leveraging our team's deep industry experience, we set out to close the information gap that exists between companies with a new cloud-based approach. With Clearstory, regardless of what financial software a Subcontractor and General Contractor is using internally, they can all be on the same page in real-time. Using our cloud-based COR log, Subcontractors can send CORs and have them instantly appear in their General Contractor’s account. Contractors now have a shared source of truth to ensure what they are forecasting internally ties out to the companies they collaborate with on projects.
But we didn’t stop there. 99% of construction companies still track field-directed extra work on carbon copy T&M Tags, which are driven back to the office, where they’re scanned and manually priced out as an associated Change Order Request. With Clearstory's tools, Subcontractors can complete this process in less than two minutes—dramatically reducing waste, eliminating at-risk revenue and, best of all, reporting costs in real time to their General Contractor.
We are fortunate to have some of the country’s largest Subcontractors and General Contractors as early customers. This list includes world-class Subcontractors like Performance Contracting Group, Permasteelisa, Conco, BrandSafway and Topbuild and General Contractors like Novo, BuildGroup and Devcon, who have been active partners and helped guide our road map to this point.
There are many technology trends shaping the future of construction. 3D design has led to a faster, more iterative approach to project delivery, which in turn means more changes at a faster pace. Our industry is at its breaking point trying to keep up using manual processes to communicate project costs. Clearstory is here to support our industry with the modern tools needed to take on this new era.
I want to especially thank Jackson Square Ventures for believing in and helping us shape our vision. Their track record speaks for itself and I am proud and grateful to join their portfolio of incredible companies.
I also want to thank our team members here at Clearstory. As a small boot strapped company it has been incredible to witness such determination and hard work take shape in the form of an incredible product and happy customers.
The ultimate beneficiaries of this investment: Our customers. With this capital we are going to double down on our vision and take our product to new heights!
