Tradesmith is North Labs' construction data analytics and bid intelligence platform for general contractors, real estate developers, and heavy civil engineering firms. It connects to the tools you already run, like Procore and Sage, to automate bid leveling and analyze historical bids. The intelligence layer compounds with every project, and you own it for good. SaaS tools rent you intelligence and take it back when you leave. Tradesmith leaves the knowledge with you, with conversational access through Slack, Teams, or any messaging tool.
"Tradesmith cuts subcontractor costs by more than 20%. It does this by vetting the scope and checking pricing accuracy."
— Tyler Kramer, Project Executive, ICON NationalEvery bid you analyze, every vendor you work with, every project you close. That is your data, your patterns, your hard-won knowledge. It should compound for you, not train someone else's intelligence. Tradesmith builds a customer-owned intelligence layer that grows more valuable with every project.
Construction companies generate huge amounts of operational data. It flows into SaaS tools that hand you dashboards and keep the intelligence. Your vendor history. Your bid patterns. Your margin outcomes. It is your data, but it builds someone else's moat.
You should own your intelligence infrastructure the same way you own your equipment. Not a subscription that disappears when you stop paying. An asset that grows more valuable with every project.
That is what we build. Intelligence that compounds for the people who generate it. Every project that runs through Tradesmith makes the system smarter for your firm.
A general chatbot does not know that fire caulk is always excluded. It does not understand why that $612K plumbing bid can really cost you $900K. We do, because we have lived it. Every model we build encodes construction knowledge, not just language patterns.
Dashboards do not change behavior. Tools people have to remember to check do not get checked. Real intelligence shows up where decisions happen, in email, in meetings, in the systems your team already uses. We do not ask you to change your workflow. We fit into it.
Your ERP has cost data. Your PM tool has schedules. Your email has vendor communications. Intelligence that sees one silo is half-blind. We connect all of it, not to replace your tools, but to make them smarter together.
Our model ties our success to yours. We invest against your contract volume, not headcount. When you win projects, we win. When you protect margin, that is real money in your pocket.
We start with the outcome, not the technology. We find a landing spot, prove it, and expand from there. We do not boil the ocean.
Upload any PDF, Excel, or email chain. Tradesmith reads it like a senior estimator. It normalizes line items, catches scope gaps, and levels bids in minutes.
Generates a risk-ranked prep package for negotiation meetings. It surfaces the exact questions to ask each finalist based on deep document analysis.
Connects bids to actuals in real-time. Track over/under billing and margin drift before it becomes a problem, not after.
Built-in modules for Davis-Bacon, prevailing wage, Section 3, and HUD compliance. We automate the high-calorie work of payroll and regulatory verification.
Automatically builds institutional memory. "This electrical sub bid 15% under last time and missed schedule by 3 weeks." The knowledge stays; the risk goes away.
The Partners: two Arizona-based regional general contractors ($300M+ annual volume).
The challenge. High manual overhead in bid reviews and a recurring issue with buried exclusions leading to six-figure change orders during the WIP phase.
The mic drop. Tradesmith flagged a $230,000 water heater exclusion buried on page 47 of a plumbing bid that three senior PMs had missed. It was caught in the first 5 minutes of analysis.
I started pulling wire when I was fourteen. My dad was an electrician. Summers and weekends, I was on job sites learning the simplest rule in construction: do it right or do it twice. No shortcuts. No hiding. If you cut corners, somebody pays for it later, usually the person who can least afford the mistake.
I grew up in Minneapolis. The work ethic there is blunt. Show up. Do what you said you'd do. Earn trust one job at a time. Later, Phoenix, where the heat humbles you and the job site teaches you quickly whether your plan is real or just words. That is where I learned what construction actually is. Not the sanitized version in software demos. The real thing.
Then I joined the military. I was a hydraulics specialist, then a flying crew chief for USAF and NATO Special Operations. The military teaches you how to operate when things are messy. How to make decisions with incomplete information. How to build systems that work even when the environment doesn't cooperate. Those lessons transfer directly to construction.
Most construction software misses because it's built by people who've never lived a job site. They build dashboards. They move data around. They add steps. But they don't eliminate risk, and they don't capture the knowledge that actually makes money. I started North Labs because the people who build our physical world deserve better than another place for information to get lost.
This isn't a Silicon Valley bet on construction tech. This is a builder's answer to a builder's problem, from someone who grew up around the trade, served his country, and came back to build something that actually helps the people doing the work. That's North Labs. That's Tradesmith. That's what we're building.
We run advisory-led engagements in Data and AI. Industry subject matter experts act as your trusted advisors. Forward-deployed engineers embed inside your organization and work as a hybrid of engineer, consultant, and product manager. They learn how you operate, then design, build, and run the systems in production.
Industry subject matter experts sit with your team and set the metrics that matter. They find the landing spot: one real problem worth solving first, not a three-year roadmap.
They embed in your organization as engineer, consultant, and product manager in one, and build alongside your people. They ship data engineering, warehousing, and applied AI to production.
We get Data and AI into production and keep it running. We make it boring. That is the point. Demos are easy. Production is the job, and the system stays with you when we leave.
We believe this is the delivery model for the future of business. It is how industrials and the mid-market reach their full impact, on the economy and on people's lives.
Whether you're a contractor looking to protect margin at scale, or just want to swap war stories about scope gaps, we would like to hear from you.