Construction payroll platform Miter has raised a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, and it plans to spend the money on AI tools that reach past payroll into job costing, safety and accounts payable. The company announced the round Sept. 30, putting its total funding at $78 million. Bessemer Venture Partners and Coatue, both existing investors, joined.
The headline claim is bigger than the check. Miter says roughly two of every 100 American construction workers now get paid through its system.
What the Construction Payroll Numbers Do and Don’t Show
That figure is the company’s own, and it didn’t publish a headcount. Against the roughly 8.3 million people the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts in construction employment, 2% would be about 165,000 workers. Miter also says more than 2,000 contractors use the platform and that it touches hundreds of thousands of active jobs a month.
Two named customers give the claim some weight. Clayco, the Chicago-based design-builder, is one. Haugland Group, a New York infrastructure contractor with more than 1,600 employees, is the other. Haugland describes itself as union-strong, and union crews working across state lines are where construction payroll gets ugly.
One detail doesn’t line up. The press release says Miter tripled its customer count since its Series A in May 2025. The company’s own blog post about the round says the count has nearly tripled. The difference is small. It’s also the kind of rounding that tends to run in one direction.
Why Payroll Is the Wedge Into the Contractor Back Office
CEO Connor Watumull, who founded Miter with Tobin Paxton, argues most contractors run on what he calls a “Frankenstack”: decades-old accounting software, spreadsheets and paper. He’s not wrong about the cause. A single crew can trigger prevailing wage rules, certified payroll reports, withholding in several states and state-specific break rules in the same week. Generic payroll vendors don’t handle that.
Whoever owns payroll owns the labor data, and labor data feeds job cost. That’s why every vendor in this corner of the market is heading for the same place. Trayd, which launched an accounting product in September, wants the general ledger. Adaptive raised $30 million for accounting agents. Miter is coming at the ledger from the timecard side.
Where Miter’s AI Features Sit Today
Miter’s description of its AI is specific enough to evaluate. In the office, it reads invoices and pay rate tables and turns them into structured data, then flags labor and cost trends while a job is still open. In the field, it drafts safety reports from photos or voice notes and summarizes job status.
None of that is exotic. Document parsing and summarization are the parts of AI that work reliably now, and a wage table is a good test because errors show up in somebody’s paycheck. The harder promise is the next one: products for accounts payable and project analytics that the company says it’s building.
The money will also pay for engineering hires in San Francisco and New York and for sales teams across the U.S.
What Contractors Should Ask Before Switching Payroll
Battery general partner Michael Brown said in the release that construction’s complexity has kept software vendors from building tools that fit. True, and it cuts both ways. A contractor moving payroll mid-year is taking on certified payroll history and union fringe tables in one cutover.
Ask for references at your size and in your states. Ask what happens to the ERP you already have, because the release lists payroll, HR, field operations and expense management, and stops short of the general ledger.
At $78 million raised and 2,000 customers, Miter is no longer the small vendor in the room. The 2% claim, if it holds, would make it one of the larger payroll processors in the trades. By the next round, a claim that size should come with a denominator.