Built Technologies to Manage Project Cash From Lenders

When it comes to CRE construction, there’s always a question of following the money. Not primarily to discover something, but to get a project funded and completed.

Built Technologies has been chasing this concept more generally since it started in 2014. It first developed products to manage construction and real estate loan portfolios as well as to perform asset management, project financials, and payment management. According to Crunchbase, it’s received $312.7 million in funding so far.

Now the company is expanding to provide national software for owners and developers, with the ability to process documents that prove completion of a stage and then request the next amount of funding from a lender. And then, with the money in, to pay contractors for the work they have completed. Owners can manage versions of projects and do scenario planning with what-if considerations.

“The payment itself is not that hard,” chief executive officer Chase Gilbert tells GlobeSt.com. The hard part is “remembering to capture proof of insurance or what you need to capture” to authorize the transfer of upstream money from the lender and downstream money to the contractors.

Some investors Built claims are Brookfield Growth, HighSage Ventures, Fifth Wall, and TCV. Brookfield is reportedly also an early user.

Three things make the new product as a logical extension of what the company has done with previous products of particular interest. First is the concept of building out, section by section, a financial infrastructure. Second, building that infrastructure in a complicated environment with federal, state, and local regulations that can all have influence what needs to be done and when.

“It’s an unbelievable fragmented industry,” Gilbert says. There is no general agreement on how to organize information. Requirements can differ from one location to the next, or from one type of construction to another.

The third point is how the company started with lenders. Because those companies have the money that everyone below wants, they can set requirements of how owners and developers use software to interact, so the approach provided a platform that could bring in other parts. “It probably wasn’t until four years in until we understand the importance of working with the lenders,” says Gilbert, who said they’re working with 300 lenders.

By starting at the top and then building out and down, Built essentially took on a process of money plumbing — at first working with the money equivalent of a water main, then following down to the next level of distribution. In the future they’re planning products for the contractors, to continue the flow of money from the lender through all organizations and people involved in completing the construction.