Our Seed Investment in Beam: Billing and Compliance for the Construction Industry

Every construction project involves the tight choreography of general contractors, subcontractors, structural engineers, architects, and other small businesses, bound by a blueprint and (very loosely) a timeline. Embedded in these relationships are contracts and payments that are complicated to track, and often underwritten by clunky and overpriced legacy software – or worse – pen, paper and physical checks. 

It’s easy to see how, in addition to legislative roadblocks, a lack of modern tooling contributes to our nationwide housing shortage; it’s too hard to build. As deep investors in fintech-related companies (including Unit, Braintree and Venmo), we’ve seen innovation in payments and invoicing touch so many other industries. However, construction-related billing has yet to have its renaissance. 

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Beam tackles this problem with an easy-to-use billing and compliance platform for mid-market general contractors and subcontractors that enables users to upload relevant documents, and track, send, and receive payments. Founder and CEO Adam Eagle spent five years as a staff engineer at Stripe, most notably building out the Stripe Billing and invoicing product (where I had the privilege of getting to know him as his Product Marketing counterpart). He’s now applying his expertise in building a billing product from the ground up to an industry that he has long been passionate about. 

Beam enables construction businesses to collaborate online for payments and compliance, bringing together various parties in the Beam network to allow for seamless and prompt payments. Long term, Beam will embed even more financial services into their platform as they set out to be the comprehensive financial source of truth for the construction industry. Since their founding in the fall of 2022, Beam has already hired an impressive team of engineers and designers and built the first version of the product. They onboarded their first set of general contractor customers who happily bid adieu to paper checks and now rely on Beam to send payments to their subcontractors electronically. 

We’re thrilled to partner with Adam and the Beam team as they create modern, frictionless, user-friendly software for the construction industry.