From sawdust to seed round: ConstructionClock grows from Winnipeg

Construction workers are paid to put their elbow grease into building homes, not filling out paperwork. But if they want to get paid, they eventually need to put down the hammer and pick up the pen.

“We’re tracking all this verified time; now it’s time to pay these people.”

Nobody knows this better than David Peters. Peters ran his own subcontracting business for nearly two decades.His employees just wanted to get paid; they would often hastily fill their hours into a form at the end of their shift, and often overestimate in the process.  

“My biggest pain point was our margins got eaten away with bad time tracking … inadvertent time theft,” Peters told BetaKit in an interview at the SAAS NORTH conference in November. 

“Part of it is my fault: as a construction company owner, I should have done a better job,” Peters added. “But also part of it was [that] there’s just not great tools for SMB construction.”

Sick of low margins, Peters decided to get into tech. For the past three years, he’s been building ConstructionClock in his hometown of Winnipeg. The app lets workers focus on the job at hand by automating labour time and attendance tracking, clocking them in and out of work based on geolocation data. 

Now, the founder and CEO is looking to use the proceeds of a new $2-million CAD seed round to triple ConstructionClock’s customer count in 2026, and take the natural next step with the product. 

“We’re tracking all this verified time; now it’s time to pay these people,” Peters said. 

Winnipeg Bets

Peters, whose voice sounds sandpaper rough from breathing in “a lot” of sawdust over the years, isn’t the prototypical tech founder. Construction is about blueprints and projected costs, a language he understood, while tech is about vision and forecasts.  

“I felt like a massive charlatan,” Peters said. “But I overcame that because I had invested my life savings into this company.”  

On top of that, he’s building a startup in Winnipeg’s small tech ecosystem. There are next to no venture capital firms, and there aren’t many angel investors, meaning not many people are willing to make bets on tech companies in the area, he explained. 

“If you are pre-revenue, it’s impossible to raise in Winnipeg,” Peters said. 

Iain Crozier, founder and general partner of Winnipeg-based Trillick Ventures, agrees with Peters’ assessment. Trillick, a ConstructionClock investor, is one of the few Winnipeg venture players trying to bolster the city’s ecosystem.

“There’s just very little activity happening in Manitoba,” Crozier said. “Most successful companies have had to raise outside of Manitoba, or they have very, very big cap tables that take them a very long time to assemble.”

Despite being a tech newbie in these conditions, Crozier said Peters was “very persistent” to grow and attract the right investors for his vision. 

ConstructionClock wasn’t Peters’ first rodeo, however. In early 2022, Peters secured a pre-seed round for his first tech startup, RoofBundle, which ended in a legal battle with one of its investors. The dispute was settled the day before it was set to go to court. 

“I have lots of opinions about that whole thing, as a first-time founder that was six months into it, I didn’t know what I was doing, and it was a learning experience for me,” Peters said in a follow-up phone interview. “I put it behind me, I don’t really care about that anymore.”

“I felt like a massive charlatan. But I overcame that because I had invested my life savings into this company.” 

He pivoted to his new company, ConstructionClock, in late 2022, bringing much of his team with him to tackle the time and attendance problem for subcontractors. From here, his “saving grace” was Manitoba’s Small Business Venture Capital Tax Credit, which, combined with moving fast with the product, allowed ConstructionClock to raise “just enough” funding to stay alive in the beginning. The startup raised a $1.2-million pre-seed in late 2024, not including a secondary component for some early angels that cashed out. 

Peters wanted to triple the company’s size in 2025 following the fundraise. When that seemed achievable, he went to investors in the summer for a new, $2-million seed round. He wanted to “keep it small,” but now he had a very un-Winnipeg problem: too many investors wanted in. 

Better problems

Peters set the round terms and whittled it down to three investors: Trillick, who cut the biggest cheque, and two returning investors in Chicago-based M25 and an undisclosed “superangel,” whom Peters said runs one of the largest tech companies in Winnipeg. 

Peters has an interesting relationship with Trillick. After investing a “small amount,” ConstructionClock’s CFO, Dominique Smith, is an LP in the fund. She is also his wife. 

“Is that normal in other areas? Probably not,” Peters said. “But here in Winnipeg, we have a very small ecosystem, and we support each other like crazy.” 

Crozier agreed with Peters, calling it a “really good example” of how integrated the Winnipeg tech community is. He said Smith is one of Trillick’s many LPs, and claimed that her involvement had no impact on Trillick’s decision to invest in ConstructionClock. 

RELATED: New early-stage VC fund Trillick Ventures aims to bring funding to “underrepresented” Manitoba

“Many Manitoban founders are LPs in Trillick, and we’re a small-but-growing tech ecosystem who collectively want to help each other win, and be invested in the success of our peers,” Crozier said. 

ConstructionClock has 3,000 companies on its platform right now, and Peters’ goal is to use the seed funding to triple its customer count by the end of 2026. The company has a very short sales cycle, usually taking less than a week for a prospective customer to decide to use its platform, and it adds  about 10 businesses per day. This is especially pronounced in ConstructionClock’s main market, the United States, which is home to 80 percent of its customers.

But the other 20 percent of ConstructionClock’s customers are spread across 23 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada. To increase the company’s global footprint, Peters is looking to use the fresh funding to spend more on ads and add another 10  salespeople to its 25-person headcount. 

Then comes ConstructionClock’s next big feature, payroll, which Peters called the “natural progression” of the platform. Set to launch in certain US states halfway through 2026, ConstructionClock won’t just handle payroll for subcontractors, the new offering will also include earned wage access (EWA). Using a partner’s whitelabelled EWA service, tradespeople will be able to walk off the job site and withdraw the money they just earned without needing to wait for payday. 

“Restaurants do this, lots of service-based businesses do EWA, nobody’s doing this for construction right now, especially not in SMB,” Peters said. 

Winnipeg’s relatively small tech scene is home to players like Bold Commerce, Taiv, and SkipTheDishes. Peters said that, without those stories, he doesn’t know if he “would have had the guts” to jump into the tech scene. 

“You always want to do something big in your hometown, of course, and that’s what I want to do,” Peters said. Now, Crozier calls ConstructionClock a “standout” company in the ecosystem. 

“Winnipeg, yeah, it’s not the sexiest city in the world, but I feel like we can build a really great business there,” Peters added. “We just want to be one of those companies that continues to grow, and hire a bunch of Winnipeggers.”

BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.

All images courtesy David Peters/ConstructionClock