Earlytrade Raises $25 Million to Bring Agentic AI to Construction Sector

Construction industry working capital management platform Earlytrade said it has raised $25 million in total funding.

The company made this announcement Tuesday (June 9) following its Series A round, saying it was using its capital to expand in the U.S. and add agentic artificial intelligence (AI) into its marketplace infrastructure.

Founded in Australia but since re-incorporated in the U.S., Earlytrade’s subcontractor payments marketplace is designed to let general contractors trade working capital with their subcontractor base, giving them the ability to secure their supply chains and deliver on projects.

“Every dollar that flows through a construction project passes through a payment bottleneck that has never been solved at scale. Earlytrade has built the infrastructure layer that makes agentic AI in this space possible,” said Charlie Plauche, whose S3 Ventures led the Series A.

“That combination of a proven two-sided marketplace and a genuine AI deployment path is exactly what we look for when we back a category-defining company,” Plauche added.

As Earlytrade noted in the release, while the American construction industry generates more than $2 trillion in output each year, subcontractors perform a bulk of this work and routinely wait anywhere from 60 to 90 days to get paid. PYMNTS explored this problem in a report earlier this year.

“The construction industry builds skylines, bridges and critical infrastructure, yet its own critical financial infrastructure often runs on outdated payment practices,” that report said.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that 70% of contractors and subcontractors report dealing with payment delays on a routine basis, an issue that has become a fixture of the industry’s operating model.

“In construction’s highly fragmented ecosystem, one where developers, general contractors, subcontractors and suppliers form interdependent chains; cash flow disruptions can propagate quickly,” the report said. “Subcontractors frequently absorb the greatest shock. Many are forced to front material costs and labor expenses while awaiting payment from upstream partners.”

Earlytrade said its subcontractor payment marketplace addresses this problem by giving subcontractors control over when and at what rate they access capital owed to them.

Meanwhile, the company’s new agentic AI exploration comes as the larger construction industry is using the technology into the core of how operations are planned, overseen and carried out, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

“What is emerging is not a single ‘AI tool,’ but an ecosystem of agents, predictive systems and autonomous machines that are beginning to reshape the economics and risk profile of building,” that report added.

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