The paving industry has long relied on a bunch of spreadsheets, whiteboards, and handwritten notes to keep projects moving. This ad hoc system comes with costly inefficiencies, limited visibility, and lost revenue. OneCrew, a San Francisco startup, looks to disrupt this $150 billion market by delivering a unified platform tailor-made for paving contractors.
The company announced a $7.5 million Series A round led by Stage 2 Capital, with participation from existing investors Entourage and Bienville Capital, pushing its total funding to $11.75 million. The capital will fund product development and team growth as OneCrew pushes to digitise an industry still largely running on paper and disconnected systems.
In a conversation with TFN, Ari Bleemer, CEO and co-founder of OneCrew, shares, “The paving industry ($150B+) faces critical inefficiencies from disconnected systems during their compressed 6-9 month seasonal windows. Estimating has been especially challenging as estimators retire and take their industry knowledge with them.
By providing a highly configurable yet simple estimating tool, we’ve helped contractors bring estimator onboarding time down from a year to less than a month. Our customers have reported more than 75% reduction in estimating time, 40% revenue increases, and hundreds of hours saved monthly.”
Connecting office, field, and subcontractors
Founded by Ari Bleemer and Max Kostow, OneCrew was born from a recognition of a massive technology gap in critical infrastructure industries.
Bleemer tells us: “OneCrew was founded after recognising a massive gap in technology serving critical infrastructure industries. While I was working in consulting, it was frustrating to see these industries, which support how people live daily, being entirely overlooked by the tech world. The paving industry represents this perfectly: nearly everyone in the US interacts with it daily, yet contractors were stuck with unintuitive, half-baked software solutions.
We saw an industry which genuinely wanted good technology but had been burned by poor products, creating scepticism that wasn’t about resistance to change, it was about finally getting quality software built specifically for their needs.”
Bleemer emphasises that OneCrew’s mission is about building a platform for the entire industry’s growth and sustainability. “This industry deserves the same quality software that ‘sexier’ sectors receive. We’re providing a platform for growth that helps contractors build durable businesses capable of scaling, knowledge transfer, and weathering industry challenges.”
Innovative technology driving industry transformation
The platform treats estimating like the backbone of operations, consolidating project data from bids through to invoicing. It’s built from the ground up by engineers fluent in the paving business, not grafted turnkey solutions. Key features include swift proposal generation, drag-and-drop scheduling with live profitability tracking, and mobile-enabled job costing designed for field crew adoption.
“OneCrew is pushing out legacy players like HCSS and B2W for larger firms, while small and mid-sized operations jump from manual or vertical-agnostic software that falls short,” Bleemer said.
The fresh funding will support launching a subcontractor portal and enterprise-level tools by year’s end, connecting more pieces of the paving supply chain than ever before.
