Skillit, an AI-enabled software platform for recruiting, selecting and coordinating the onboarding of skilled construction workers, announced on June 22 a strategic partnership with DPR Construction and Suffolk Technologies, the venture capital arm of Suffolk Construction.
The partnership, backed by equity investments from DPR’s venture capital group, WND Ventures and Suffolk Technologies, aims to further develop the skilled workforce platform. The contractors did not disclose the dollar value of the investments, but say they will continue to work with Skillit founder and CEO Fraser Patterson and his management team to grow the platform as they continue to use it. The startup has also received investment funding from MetaProp, Building Ventures, Bull Capital and Holt Ventures.
Patterson himself came up in the skilled trades as a carpenter by trade before running his own general contracting business in New York, where Skillit is also based, and saw the challenge of finding skilled labor firsthand.
“I was trying to find labor, in many cases, labor was ultimately available, but finding it was difficult because [the construction workforce] it has never really been digitized. Craftsmen’s skills and preferences are essentially invisible for all intents and purposes.”
Skillit’s platform uses an AI agent to do all the things that skilled artisans generally don’t have time to do, such as filling out resume items on their profile, cataloging their project experience, and responding to job board postings. Word of mouth still plays an important role in hiring skilled labor, so the platform natively takes voice commands from users.
“The first way we use AI is to help workers be native to their user experience, to create a profile that can help them discover jobs,” says Patterson. “The next piece, of course, is to use AI to dynamically ask the questions that are asked of the worker, which actually comes from the demand on the platform.”
Patterson said that when he and the Skillit team first started addressing the issues of a skilled labor platform in 2021 and 2022, they quickly realized that the problem many startups ran into was that they were trying to copy the LinkedIn or Indeed model for skilled tradesmen too directly.
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“What we did is we went to meet with a bunch of ENR prime contractor companies and started to get a feel for what it’s really like to try to hire boats, and what you realize is that most of the hiring is from these prime companies,” he said. “They do all the foundational work. Energy farms and network infrastructure upgrades and data centers, hospitals, housing, etc. If you sit down with them, you start to realize that they’re hiring in multiple trades at once, in multiple regions at once, in multiple types of work at once, so you have one union in this market and a different union in that market to be signatories in that local market.”
Patterson said he quickly learned the platform needed to capture the nuances of a union and open workforce, with details about per diems, relocations for traveling artisans and other industry-specific qualities.
“We see the future of construction contracting as more connected, more responsive and based on the real needs of the job site. Skillit’s platform reflects that direction,” says DPR Construction Board Member Eric Lamb.
Suffolk Ventures said its investment in Skillit is part of an overall strategy to change the way all contractors are hired in order to create more cost certainty across the industry.
“Skillit is addressing a critical gap in the industry with technology built specifically for the realities of construction procurement and labor deployment,” said Jit Kee Chin, chief technology officer of Suffolk Construction and managing partner of Suffolk Technologies. “As labor becomes the industry’s most constrained resource, the ability to attract and build winners will increase losses.”
