Earlytrade Pty. Ltd., a company solving payments flow for contractors in the construction industry, today announced it has raised about $10 million in new funding.

Today’s capital infusion brings the total raised by the company to $25 million, including an earlier Series A round. The round was led by S3 Ventures and Brick & Mortar Ventures. The company said it will deploy the new funds to expand across the United States and build agentic artificial intelligence into its back-end core infrastructure.

Construction is one of the last major industries still dominated by manual, paper-heavy payment workflows. Agentic AI promises to autonomously route capital, predict cash-flow needs and optimize payment timing across thousands of subcontractor relationships simultaneously — turning payment ops from a cost center into a profit center.

In construction, payments normally flow extremely slowly. A property owner needs work done and hires a general contractor to build something. The GC doesn’t do all the work itself; it hires subcontractors – essentially specialists who do jobs such as electrical, plumbing, foundations, carpentry and the like. When the work is complete, the subcontractors submit invoices, and then months later, often 60 to 90 days, they get paid.

That’s just the industry norm. Essentially, the GC is sitting on money that’s already owed to the subcontractor, and the subcontractor has to make it on their own (probably doing more jobs), dealing with payroll, materials and equipment costs in the meantime. Many subcontractors are small businesses, so this wait can be devastating — sometimes leading to insolvency. It also leads to predatory, dark patterns.

According to Earlytrade, it doesn’t have to be this way.

The company built a system where the subcontractors take a discount now and receive a payment now. Let’s say it’s about 2%. If a GC owes a subcontractor $100,000 in 60 days, Earlytrade can get the sub paid $98,000 today instead of $100,000 in two months. That gives them the working capital to get moving faster.

Earlytrade has been light on detailing how it’s incorporating AI into its systems. From executive comments and industry standards, we can infer that they will use agentic AI to facilitate autonomous payment optimization, learn subcontractor cash flow and negotiate between general contractors and subs to suggest and execute early payment offers at optimal times. Agents can also design dynamic pricing: Instead of a flat discount, they could negotiate rates in real-time based on project timelines, financial health, local inflation, market conditions, project urgency, predictive assessments and more.

“Strong U.S. growth has made one thing clear: The time is right to make a significant investment in agentic AI within our subcontractor payments marketplace,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Guy Saxelby. “We’re actively seeking exceptional talent across AI, product and sales.”

The U.S. Census Bureau construction spending data annual rate shows a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $2.17 trillion for December 2025. Of that, specialty trade contractors (the subs who actually benefit from Earlytrade) account for roughly $875 billion in annual revenue. According to Worldmetrics, an independent market research platform, 78% of U.S. contractors specifically name labor shortages as their top challenges, as delayed payments squeeze out their ability to pay workers.

“Subcontractors value having flexibility in how and when they access capital to support their businesses,” said Dave Anderskow, chief financial officer at Power Construction, a general contractor and client of Earlytrade. “Earlytrade’s marketplace allows us to invest in our trade partners’ growth in a way that is both disciplined and sustainable.”

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