Why we built Sledge

My grandpa was a contractor. My dad was a contractor. I am a contractor.

I still run Ferrocrete Builders, a $100M+ concrete construction company here in Los Angeles. For 20 years I ran it on software that stored my work and handed it right back. I bought the estimating tool. I bought the accounting system. I bought the project management system. Then I sat down at night and did the work anyway.

That is why we built Sledge™, and today we are opening the waitlist.

I did not build it alone. Matteo Miralaie, our COO, is an engineer who worked on NASA data pipelines and wrote the first version of this thing. Davis Cannon, our CPO, spent ten years building AI and software products, most recently at Seekr Technologies. I brought the twenty years of knowing exactly where it hurts.

This is our first post, so here is the whole thing: what is broken, what we built, and where this goes.

Nobody gets into this business to do paperwork

You get into it because you can build. Crews show up, forms go in, concrete goes down, walls go up, and at the end of it there is something standing that was not there before.

Then there is the office. Someone writes the bid. Someone signs the contract. Someone logs the change order, runs the pay application, chases the lien waiver, matches the invoice, cuts the check, and files all of it somewhere it can be found again next year when a number gets disputed.

That is the part that runs people out of this industry. Not the work. The paperwork.

Two numbers show how bad it has gotten.

More than 16 hours a week, and that is just getting paid. General contractors now spend 73 hours a month managing payment workflows, up 26 percent in a single year.¹ Two full working days, every week, on invoices and pay applications and chasing money that was already earned. That is before bidding, contracts, scheduling, or compliance. Add those and you are at 35 percent of the workweek.²

A builder today produces less than one did in 1970. Value added per U.S. construction worker was roughly 40 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 1970.³ Through the 1950s and 60s, construction productivity grew faster than the rest of the economy. Around 1970 it turned, and it has been falling for five decades while every other sector climbed.⁴ It takes more people to put up the same building today than it did when my grandfather did it.

I did not need a study to tell me either one. I have been living inside those numbers since I was old enough to hold a shovel.

And it is not for lack of spending. Construction is a $13 trillion global industry⁵ and the second least digitized in the world, behind only agriculture.⁶ Contractors put more than $10 billion a year into software.⁷ Most of them run four or five systems, plus a folder of spreadsheets and a phone full of photos.

The problem is what those systems are built to do. They are systems of record. They store your work and hand it back, which is exactly what I spent twenty years paying for. Open the estimating tool and it shows you a blank estimate. Open the accounting system and it shows you a blank invoice. The software is waiting on you, and it will wait all night.

That is a fine design for a company with a back office to spare. Construction does not have one. A five-person masonry sub does not have an admin department. Neither does a general contractor running eleven jobs with a project manager, a bookkeeper, and an owner answering the phone from a truck.

So it piles up. Bids go out late. Change orders get remembered instead of written. Pay applications sit until someone finds a Saturday. Money earned in March gets collected in July, if it gets collected.

That is not a labor problem. The crews are good. The paperwork grew and nothing ever showed up to carry it.

What we built instead

Sledge is a system of execution. It does the work and asks you to approve it.

That is the whole difference, and it changes what your day looks like. You are not entering data. You are reviewing work that is already done.

Here is what that means in practice.

Say you run a concrete crew on three jobs. Friday afternoon your foreman sends a photo and a voice note: poured the slab on grade at the north building, footings on the east side ran deeper than the drawings called for.

You open Sledge Monday morning. The work is already done.

The month's progress invoice is drafted and sitting there, quantities pulled off the schedule of values against what actually got placed. The change order for the deeper footings is written up from your foreman's note, priced against your own cost history, ready to send to the GC. Two vendor invoices came in over the weekend, both matched against their purchase orders and coded.

Three things are waiting on you.

The rebar invoice does not match its PO. It is $1,840 over. Sledge did not decide who is right and it did not quietly pay it. It put the invoice and the PO next to each other and asked.

One of your subs has a certificate of insurance that expired eleven days ago. He is scheduled Wednesday. Sledge caught it before he showed up, not after.

And the progress invoice needs your signature before it goes anywhere. It sits there until you press send.

That is the idea. You are not doing the office work. You are approving it, in the truck, before the crew hits the gate.

The rules that keep it honest

Software that works on your behalf only earns the job if it admits what it does not know. Sledge runs on three rules, and they are not negotiable.

Numbers come from code, not from a guess. Every dollar figure Sledge shows you was computed by the system. It reports math, it does not write math.

Anything that costs money or leaves the building waits for a human. Reading and drafting happen on their own. Moving money, signing a contract, and sending anything to a client, a sub, or a vendor stops for your approval.

When it is not sure, it asks. An invoice that does not match, a gap in scope, an expired certificate, a contract clause that reads two ways. It escalates instead of guessing. A confident wrong answer is worse than a question.

Estimating, contracts, project management, field operations, compliance, and accounting all run on one set of records, which is why the handoffs stop leaking. The estimate becomes the budget. The field note becomes the change order. The change order reaches the invoice. Bid to build to paid, in one place.

What beta is teaching us

We are in private beta with general contractors, engineering firms, developers, and residential builders running real jobs, not demos. Sledge is approaching $20 million in project volume under management, the combined contract value of the work beta users actively run through it, spanning structural concrete, ground-up developments, and million-dollar custom homes.

Ferrocrete is on the large end of that group. The small shops taught us more.

"I'm a builder, not a paper pusher. Every system I've tried just piled on more office work. Sledge actually does the work though. It writes my bids, sends my invoices, and I get paid while I'm out with my guys. Nothing else in construction comes close," said Richard Segura, owner of Rascom Group, a commercial masonry contractor.

The waitlist got here the same way the beta did. No ads, no paid placement. Contractors told other contractors.

A world where anyone can build

That is what I want out of this. Not a better invoicing tool. A world where anyone who wants to build can build. This is the AI age of construction, and we are building it.

What we have built so far runs your company from bid to build to paid. We started there on purpose. Money is the part that kills contractors, and running the money means Sledge holds the record of what a job actually cost, who worked it, how long it took, and what it should cost next time. That record is what makes everything else possible.

Here is what comes next.

A way into the trade. Nobody is born knowing how to set forms. You should be able to walk in with no experience and come out employable. Sledge will teach the work, connect you to contractors who are hiring, and get you on a crew.

A way to go out on your own. Going from working for someone to working for yourself is where most good builders stall. Licensing, insurance, bidding, knowing what to charge, getting paid. Sledge will carry it, so starting a company is a decision instead of a wall.

A way to grow without drowning. Your first hire, your tenth, your hundredth. Payroll, compliance, books clean enough that your accountant stops calling. The office is what breaks growing contractors, and the office is what Sledge runs.

A way to know your numbers. What the work costs, what it should cost, what other contractors are seeing in your market. Real figures off real jobs instead of a gut feeling and a guess.

Solo operator, five-person shop, mid-sized GC, enterprise. One system that grows with the company instead of getting torn out every time it doubles.

This industry is going to run on AI. That part is not in question. The builders who pick these tools up first will win work from the ones who wait. I have been on the losing side of that trade before, watching better-equipped competitors take jobs I should have won. I do not intend to be there again, and I do not want you there either.

We are not there yet. We are going to be.

Getting in

The Sledge waitlist opens today. Everyone who joins gets founding member access, no matter where you are or what you build.

Go build. We will take care of the rest.

Join the waitlist

Not ready yet? Read the launch announcement, or send this to whoever runs your office. They will know exactly what I am talking about.

Raz Danoukh is the CEO and co-founder of Sledge. He is a third-generation contractor and runs Ferrocrete Builders, a concrete construction company in Los Angeles.

Sources

1. General contractors spend 73 hours per month managing payment workflows, a 26 percent increase over the prior year. Payment delays cost the U.S. construction industry $280 billion annually and raise project costs by approximately 14 percent. Siteline, "The State of Subcontractor Billing in 2025," August 2025. https://www.newswire.com/news/siteline-report-reveals-deepening-crisis-in-construction-payments-and-22624023 ↩
2. Respondents reported spending 35 percent of their time, more than 14 hours a week, on non-optimal activities including looking for project information, conflict resolution, and rework. Study of 599 construction industry leaders: 500 in the United States and 99 in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada, comprising 49 percent general contractors, 36 percent specialty contractors, and 15 percent owners and developers. PlanGrid and FMI Corporation, "Construction Disconnected," 2018. Full report: http://pg.plangrid.com/rs/572-JSV-775/images/Construction_Disconnected.pdf Coverage: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/industry-could-be-overspending-177b-per-year-study-finds/529450/ ↩
3. Value added per U.S. construction worker was approximately 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970. Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson, "The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector," National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30845 ↩
4. Construction productivity grew faster than the overall economy through the 1950s and 1960s, then began declining around 1970 while economy-wide productivity continued to rise. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, "Five Decades of Decline: U.S. Construction Sector Productivity," 2025. https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2025/eb_25-31 ↩
5. Global construction gross annual output reached $13 trillion in 2023. McKinsey & Company, "Improving construction productivity is the new imperative," 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/delivering-on-construction-productivity-is-no-longer-optional ↩
6. McKinsey Global Institute Industry Digitization Index, which ranks construction second from last among all sectors, ahead of only agriculture and hunting. McKinsey Global Institute, "Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity," 2017. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/reinventing-construction-through-a-productivity-revolution ↩
7. The global construction software market was valued at $10.76 billion in 2025 and $11.78 billion in 2026. Fortune Business Insights, "Construction Software Market Size, Share and Growth Report." https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/construction-software-market-110155 ↩