- Hardline has raised $2M in pre-seed funding led by Mucker Capital to tackle costly communication failures in construction.
- Founded by Alena Tuttle and Karly Heffernan, the company converts phone calls and site conversations into structured project records.
- The startup is already active across 10 US states and two countries, integrating with platforms including Procore, Autodesk, and Hilti’s Fieldwire.
Construction startup Hardline has secured $2 million in pre-seed funding to modernise how construction companies handle the endless stream of calls, walk-throughs, and verbal updates that shape projects every day. The round was led by Mucker Capital, with backing from StandUp Ventures, Suffolk Technologies, Nirman Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
Founded in 2025 by Alena Tuttle and Karly Heffernan, the latter a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree in the Manufacturing & Industry category, the Santa Monica-headquartered startup is focused on one of construction’s biggest operational problems: information getting lost between job sites and office systems. The industry loses tens of billions of dollars annually because of poor communication and incomplete documentation, making workflow automation a rapidly growing segment within construction tech.
“I grew up on construction sites. The problem has never been that supers and PMs don’t know what’s happening on their jobs—it’s that they spend half their day documenting it after the fact, hunched over a laptop in a job trailer. Hardline closes that gap at the point of contact, the moment a call ends, before anyone has to open a spreadsheet,” says Karly Heffernan.
“We are not asking field crews to change anything. We meet them where they already are—on the phone. The voice layer of construction has been invisible to project management software until now. Hardline makes it legible,” notes Alena Tuttle.
Hardline’s platform captures conversations from jobsite phone calls and onsite discussions before automatically transforming them into structured documentation, including RFIs, punch lists, change orders, task assignments, and daily logs. The system integrates directly with widely used construction software such as Procore, Autodesk Forma, and Hilti’s Fieldwire, while supporting both English and Spanish for field teams.
Competitors include OpenSpace, which focuses on reality capture and site documentation, Buildots, known for AI-driven project tracking, and Versatile, which uses crane and site data to improve operational visibility. Hardline, however, is betting that voice data, often ignored by existing platforms, represents a major untapped layer of project intelligence.
To strengthen its technical capabilities, the company appointed Kimball Hill as chief technology officer. Hill previously worked as a senior AI engineer at Klarity, where he built multi-agent systems and enterprise AI tooling for large-scale data analytics deployments.
“One of the consistent challenges we see in the field is that the most important project information doesn’t always make it into systems of record. It lives in calls, conversations, and quick decisions on-site,” says Parker Mundt, partner and head of platform at Suffolk Technologies.
“Alena and Karly are precisely the kind of founders we love to invest in – creative, committed to excellence, and using their industry insider know-how to be first to market with a novel and entirely modern solution that is seamless for its users,” adds Michelle McBane, managing director at StandUp Ventures.
“Nirman began backing Hardline early last year, and we increased our commitment this round. The administrative burden on field managers is real, expensive, and getting worse as back-office headcount shrinks — and field users often skip daily reports simply because the flow of work doesn’t stop. A voice-first tool that slots into the platforms builders already use, without a learning curve, is exactly the future we see for field input. Hardline is pulling that future forward,” notes Gregg Wallace, general partner at Nirman Ventures.
Hardline is already operating across 10 states and two countries, serving commercial contractors, residential builders, and specialty trades. Following its selection into the 2025 BOOST Accelerator run by Suffolk Technologies and recognition from BuiltWorlds and the International Builders’ Show, the company plans to use the fresh funding to deepen software integrations, accelerate product development, and expand across the SMB construction market while scaling the telephony infrastructure at the core of its business.
