Montréal’s Brdg has closed $850,000 CAD in pre-seed funding to help real estate developers, cost consultants, and lenders navigate the complex world of financing construction projects in Canada.
“The construction financing process is quite archaic,” Brdg co-founder Ness Cabessa told BetaKit in an interview. Cabessa said it is both fragmented and manual-labour-intensive.
“A lot of time is being wasted, and time in construction is money.”
Construction draws, which are typically overseen by cost consultants, are a phased payment system whereby lenders closely monitor developers’ progress and release loan funds in installments as they achieve project milestones.
Cabessa and Brdg co-founder Samuel Brand dealt with these challenges firsthand during their time working in general contracting and development, respectively. “A lot of time is being wasted, and time in construction is money,” Cabessa said.
After learning how difficult this process was to manage, especially for larger projects and small to mid-sized developers with limited internal infrastructure, they soon realized that this was a problem that few others were addressing.
Cabessa and Brand launched Brdg in 2024 with co-founder Daniel Bensoussan, and the trio sees room to use AI to simplify the construction draw process for all parties.
The construction tech startup’s pre-seed round, which closed earlier this month, was raised through a simple agreement for future equity from a group that included New York’s Forum Ventures and undisclosed strategic investors from the real estate and construction finance world.
In a news release, Forum partner Kevin Corliss said the firm was attracted to the domain experience that Cabessa and Brand bring and their “commercially savvy” cost consulting partnership-based distribution approach, calling them “a team that understands not just the problem but how to build a real business around it.”
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Cabessa, Brand, and Bensoussan have developed a construction finance platform designed to replace fragmented spreadsheets and manual work with centralized software that automates document collection, compliance reviews, budget validation, and draw packaging.
“We’re giving developers the tools to simplify the construction financing process, but also enabling cost consultants to automate [their daily] administrative workflows,” Cabessa said.
Brdg launched in beta near the start of 2026, and was made available to the broader public earlier this summer. Today, Cabessa said Brdg has partnered with industry stakeholders across projects representing more than $600 million in active development, from high-rise residential rental buildings to industrial projects, hotels, and shopping centres.
The startup hopes to one day become “the operating system for construction finance.” The next step on that path, Cabessa said, involves growing Brdg’s five-person team, layering on more agentic AI, and pursuing strategic partnerships in the construction lending space as it looks to expand its presence across Canada.
Feature image courtesy Brdg.