Trestle announced on September 4 that it has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed capital, led by venture capital funds Lerer Hippeau, with participation from MetaProp, Laconia Capital, Alumni Ventures and others.
New York-based Trestle offers a cloud platform for subcontractor and vendor qualification and management, including the ability to automate prequalification. The company has a database of 54,000 subcontractors and suppliers on its platform, focused primarily on those used in heavy civil construction projects. Trestle Benchmark is a data-driven supplier management software that allows users to track the past performance of subcontractors.
Trestle co-founder and CEO Victor Zhang, a professional engineer and former senior estimator and alternative delivery executive at Dragados USA, brought his experience with estimating and prequalification to Trestle when he started it in 2022 with CTO and co-founder Jason Chen.
Zhang says that when the Trestle development team started working with general contractor customers, they wanted questions that were discipline-specific for each of the subcontractors they were working with to be answered and evaluated on the Trestle platform.
“Only specific subscribers who work in specific jobs are rated based on the questions in those trades,” he adds. “Now that’s a feature of the product: you can really target it to what you’re looking for.”
Zhang says Trestle’s application program interface is native to the API, so any accounting or ERP system a contractor uses can link to its database of subcontractor and supplier information. The company has Procore integration for project management.
If all a contractor can see is what they’ve paid a subcontractor or vendor on a project-by-project basis, the contractor can’t know what their true workload is with that subcontractor or vendor, Zhang says, adding that managing suppliers and knowing how much a general contractor works with them without all of their spending being tied to a project code can show a more complete picture.
“At Trestle, we look at all these projects together,” he says. “I’d say we have the most advanced prequalification product out there. The idea is that if you’re a GC, here’s one place for everything you want to know about your subordinates and suppliers.”
Andrea Hippeau, partner at Lerer Hippeau, said in a statement that they led the pre-seed round because “Trestle represents the cutting edge of construction management, seamlessly combining state-of-the-art technology with the core needs of industry”.
