While Toronto’s burgeoning tech community continues to roll the red carpet out for hundreds of new startups every year, only a handful of them focuses on the construction tech space. One of them recently opened up its satellite office located downtown Toronto.
Kitchener-Waterloo-based Bridgit, launched by Lauren Lake and Mallorie Brodie in 2014 with the goal of helping construction companies modernize with mobile and web solutions, has raised over $10 million in capital from investors such as BDC, Salesforce Ventures, IAF, Stand-Up, and Sands Capital, among others.
The women-led company has grown its team to about 50 people but everything up until now has been based in its Kitchener-Waterloo office.
Brodie, co-founder and chief executive officer of Bridgit, said based on the company’s future recruitment needs, Toronto is the place to be.
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“The Downtown Toronto office will eventually open up a lot of opportunities for people in Toronto who are either currently work in tech or thinking of joining the tech industry,” Brodie said in an interview.
Bridgit currently has two software solutions in the market, namely Bridgit Field and Bridgit Bench. Bridgit Field is a field-focused business management solution for the construction industry which offers the tools for managing tasks, quality, and insights, from one central platform.
Bridgit Bench is focused on a project’s early planning stages. It was launched this summer and is the first construction-focused workforce planning tool in the market, designed specifically for the construction industry, according to the startup.
“A lot of the companies that we work with now have been looking for something like this for quite some time,” said Lauren Lake, the chief operating officer and co-founder of Bridgit.
“Workforce planning is a kind of a process that general contractors would do very manually right now wherein they’re trying to map people to their projects, and understand who’s free at what time, who has the right skill set, who’s in the right area to go to different projects. It is a very big challenge for construction businesses to best utilize their workforce and make sure that they’re optimizing around that and Bridgit Bench tries to help construction companies overcome this challenge. The product has very-well resonated with the construction companies.”
Bridgit’s software solutions are used by leading general contractors, real-estate developers, and engineering firms across North America.