We are thrilled to announce our recent investment in Extracker, and throw our support behind its mission to create financial transparency in commercial construction by delivering a better, more collaborative solution to the age-old problem of change orders.
When we’re considering an investment, we always look for a founder in love with the problem they’re trying to solve. This description could not be more aptly applied to Extracker’s CEO Cameron Page. Prior to founding Extracker in 2018, Cameron lived with the change order problem for 10 years as a project manager on health care and campus projects around the San Francisco Bay Area. During this time, he witnessed the transformative impact of design and communication technologies (including BIM, smartphones, and others.) on the speed, complexity and frequency of iteration on projects. Suddenly, hundreds of scope changes per project became thousands.
Despite this industry-wide transformation, the way these changes in scope and cost were tracked hadn’t been updated in decades. The so-called state of the art solutions remained stagnant: Excel, carbon copy, email, and manual/duplicate entry between GC, sub-contractor, owner and designer before a manual reconciliation of data with each party’s internal systems (i.e. Procore, CMiC, etc.). And as any project stakeholder understands, mishandled change orders aren’t simply a clerical error. These are often the root cause of unsatisfactory project outcomes, including cost overruns, schedule delays, claims, and legal disputes. This inefficiency isn’t just impacting time—it can hurt business.
Put another way, projects can be made or broken by change orders, and this goes for contractors, owners, and subs. Cameron witnessed this firsthand as a GC and knew there was a better way. He envisioned a completely new change order workflow, coupled with a product-led business model to leverage the fragmented but networked nature of construction. Each time a GC brings Extracker to a project, anywhere from 10-40 subcontractors are exposed. Many of these subs then introduce Extracker to a new GC on a different project, setting up the much-needed collaborative tool for widespread use throughout the industry.
Cameron’s founding team quickly executed on this go-to-market playbook and achieved product-market fit with its initial SaaS offering, including a freemium option for invited parties to trigger the virtuous network effect. This ability to deliver value and, in doing so, sell to the entire value chain—from GCs to subs, owners and specialty trades—has put the company on an impressive growth trajectory.
For all these reasons, Building Ventures is thrilled to be investing in Extracker’s $7 million Series A, alongside Cloud Apps Capital Partners, who led the round, and Jackson Square Ventures, who led the prior Series Seed round. We’re excited to be joining this exceptional investment syndicate and can’t wait to see what Cameron and his team achieve in this next phase of their journey.
