Fieldwire, a San Francisco-based mobile and web platform designed to make collaboration on construction projects more efficient, has raised $5.5 million in fresh funding led by Formation 8. Other participants in the round included Trinity Ventures and earlier backers Bloomberg Beta and AngelPad, the investment fund and accelerator where the company first gained investors’ attention in the fall of 2013.
Including earlier seed funding, the company has now raised $6.6 million altogether.Because Fieldwire is part of an increasingly crowded, if nascent, group of startups that are zeroing in on the same market, we decided to talk last week with cofounder Yves Frinault to learn more. Our chat has been edited for length.
One of your better-known competitors is PlanGrid. How do your companies differ?
At our core, we’re a task management platform, working on tasks and collaboration, including with the foreman, the subcontractors, and labor; PlanGrid is more focused on digitizing and storing blueprints and construction documents. We’re more like Asana for construction; they’re more like Box. It’s tasks versus files.
How big is Fieldwire at this point?
We were five people. We’ve doubled in the last four months to meet demand, but we could have been a lot more; we believe in dense, focused teams. As for [our clients], there are currently 35,000 projects on the platform [owned by] 1,000 companies.
So these are big clients.
When you operate a typical SaaS company, you usually start in mid-market and go up market. In construction, it’s different. The top line, half-a-billion-dollar companies are the ones driving the projects, so we found ourselves working with those guys — the large general contractors and specialty contractors — right away.