Trestle announced Sept4 it has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed capital, led by venture capital funds Lerer Hippeau, with participation from MetaProp, Laconia Capital, Alumni Ventures and others.

New York-based Trestle provides a cloud platform for the rating and management of subcontractors and vendors, including the ability to automate pre-qualification. The company has a database of 54,000 subcontractors and suppliers on its platform, focused mainly on those that are used in heavy civil construction projects. Trestle Benchmark is a data-driven vendor management software that allows users to track subcontractors' past performance.

Trestle Co-Founder and CEO Victor Zhang, a professional engineer and former senior estimator and alternative delivery executive at Dragados USA, brought his experience with estimation and pre-qualification to Trestle when he started it in 2022 with CTO and co-founder Jason Chen. 

Zhang says when the Trestle development team first started to work with general contractor customers, they wanted questions that were discipline specific for each of the subcontractors they work with to be answered and rated on Trestle's platform. 

"Only specific subs that are working on specific jobs get rated based on questions for those trades," he adds. "Now that's a feature of the product—you can actually target it to what you're looking for."

Zhang says Trestle's application program interface is API native, so any accounting or ERP system a contractor is using can link it to their existing database of subcontractor and supplier information. The company also has Procore integration for project management purposes.

If all a contractor can see is what it has paid a subcontractor or vendor on a project-by-project basis, the contractor can't tell what its true volume of work is with that sub or vendor, Zhang says, adding that managing suppliers and knowing how much a general contractor is working with them without all of its spending tied to a project code can show a fuller picture.

"In Trestle, we look at all of those projects together," he says. "I would say we have the most advanced pre-qualification product there is out there. The idea is, if you're a GC, here's one place for everything you want to know about your subs and suppliers."

Andrea Hippeau, partner at Lerer Hippeau, said in a statement that they spearheaded the pre-seed round because “Trestle represents the forefront of construction management, seamlessly blending state-of-the-art technology with the industry’s core needs.”