Construction Clock ticking along

As a self-described blue collar construction worker, David Peters says he felt like a charlatan when he first became a tech founder.

“At the beginning, when you have no tech experience and you’re trying to convince the world, your customers, your investors that you’re the one that’s going to pull this off, yeah — you definitely feel like you’re selling a dream that you don’t know if you can pull off,” Peters said.

In 2022, the Winnipeg entrepreneur launched Construction Clock, a time tracking app for the construction industry.

The thing that gave him confidence in spite of his imposter syndrome, he said, was the amount of money he invested in the business.

“I wasn’t asking anybody to put money in before I put all of my money into this,” said Peters, who ran his own subcontracting business for two decades. “I was putting my money where my mouth was.”

Once Construction Clock had a couple hundred customers, Peters added, he stopped feeling like an imposter.

“I (thought), ‘I think we’re going to pull this off,’” he said.

“I’m not selling a dream anymore. I’m selling a reality.”

Today, 3,000 companies in 75 trades across 24 countries use Construction Clock.

The company employs about 30 people, all of whom work at the company’s headquarters on Plaza Drive.

The app tracks time hands-free using geo-locating technology so that construction companies can ditch timesheets and track every minute of every project in real time.

It shows employers how long each person worked and instantly exports into business management software such as QuickBooks.

In late 2024, the startup closed a pre-seed round of funding after raising $1.2 million.

The past nine months have included more wins for the company. In March, Peters was named Most Promising Founder at the Manitoba Tech Awards, and on Monday, he announced that Construction Clock raised $2 million in a seed round of financing.

Three investors contributed: Trillick Ventures Inc., an early stage venture capital fund based in Winnipeg, and two returning investors: M25, an early stage venture firm in Chicago, and someone Peters describes as “a super angel Winnipeg investor.”

Peters’ goal is to use the seed funding to triple Construction Clock’s customer count by the end of 2026. He also plans to hire 10 more staff members.

In the coming months, the growing team will move into a brand new, 6,400-square-foot office that Construction Clock is building in the McGillivray Business Park, just outside Winnipeg’s city limits in the Rural Municipality of Macdonald.

Construction Clock will roll out a couple of new features in the coming months, including a payroll feature. In addition to handling payroll for subcontractors, the feature will include earned wage access so that tradespeople can withdraw money they’ve earned before payday.

The company will launch the payroll feature in certain U.S. states halfway through 2026. If all goes according to plan, Peters said, the payroll feature will be available to all customers in 2027.

Construction Clock’s product roadmap for the next two years is exciting and part of what led Trillick Ventures to invest in the company, said Iain Crozier, the fund’s founder.

Crozier has known Peters for 18 months and said he’s been impressed with the company’s success so far.

“He’s been able to attract some phenomenal members of his team and has been really successful in building out a really well-rounded group working at Construction Clock and that’s been really impressive,” Crozier said.

“It shows with the growth that they’ve had both in (the) amount of companies and users that are on their site and also in the revenue that they’ve been successful in bringing in.”

Peters credits Winnipeg tech companies like SkipTheDishes with giving him the courage to start Construction Clock.

“Without those people in front of me that had built something and scaled it and sold it, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do this,” he said.

“It’s taken a long time for me to think of myself not as a construction contractor (but) as a tech founder. I’m glad I took this leap of faith.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca