Gloria Lin was part of a group that created initial prototypes for Apple Pay.
She was the seventh employee at Flipboard. Lin led the growth of Flipboard's user base from zero to more than 100 million users in 14 international markets.
After taking a year off to travel, Lin went on to become Stripe's first product management hire and worked on a variety of products.
Lin was the daughter of the owner of a trade contracting business. The challenges her father faced as a business owner in the construction industry always stayed in the back of her mind, so when Lin got the entrepreneurial itch, it was a natural move to help start a company that helped trade contractors better control their finances. The company emerged from stealth with $18.4 million in funding, of which 15 million was raised in a Series A led by Menlo Venture and $3.4 million was raised in a seed round.
Lin got a master's degree in electrical engineering and loves building infrastructure at scale. Poloney worked at a number of companies.
I saw an opportunity to take a lot of what I learned about building incredibly easy to use, powerful and delightful financial systems at scale to a brand new industry that has existed for a long time, which is construction.
According to McKinsey, the construction industry is one of the least digital in the world. The time it takes for contractors to be paid spills over into those lags. The construction sector is last place in terms of median time to get paid, behind pharmaceuticals and life sciences, according to a recent report.
It is the slowest paying industry in the world.
Trade contractors have to pay for labor and materials out of pocket before they are paid.
They are stuck in the negative working capital cycles because of the fragmented process. It has to be precise at the same time. Even a single mistake in the way that you invoice can cause a further delay in payments, which is even more painful because you are already getting paid late in other industries. It's a huge burden for trade contractors to put together a billing package in order to get paid, with a lot of documentation and compliance requirements.
Delays in gaining new business and completing projects can be caused by the lack of a consistent cash flow for contractors. The aim of Siteline is to give contractors an easy way to get paid faster and more easily with its technology. By using Siteline, trade contractors are able to do things like build accurate payment applications, manage compliance documents and monitor payment status on one platform. They can get paid faster, with the company estimating that its technology can speed up internal billing processes by up to 6x while also improving collaboration across project and finance teams.
Getting paid in construction is a huge hassle, and that makes cash flow harder to manage.
Over the course of a year, Siteline processes more than $180 million in billing for its customers. Hundreds of commercial projects are supported by it.
The company plans to use its new funding to expand.
Tyler Sosin is an active investor in construction technology. The largest segment of the construction workforce is trade contractors, and he believes that Siteline can solve the payments problem for them.
Financial fragility is one of the biggest unsolved problems for this industry. The workforce needs better tools and processes to manage their finances.
According to Sosin, who is joining the company's board, the company had been watched by Menlo for over a year.
Gloria's confidence around product market fit and Siteline's understanding of an industry that historically has been a little bit luddite in terms of adopting technology were some of the things we saw.
Lin envisions Siteline expanding to more constituencies and more products with the goal of building a modern construction finance platform for more than a trillion dollars in payments.
The Series A financing was participated in by the Designer Fund, South Park Commons Fund, and a number of angels. The founder of BuildingConnected will become a company advisor.
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