In the construction industry, where traditionally cash is king, a payments app designed to help contractors just wrapped up a $30 million round of fundraising.
Scott Wolfe, CEO of Levelset, says that money will be going toward research and development to ultimately help streamline the payment process and allow contractors to easily stay in compliance.
"We get contractors paid faster today and we want them to get paid immediately after they do the work and we're innovating to get to that reality," he told Cheddar Thursday.
Levelset has been using a vast amount of data it can glean from users about payment behavior and is trying to use that to offer some clarity in what Wolfe says is a largely opaque industry.
"We touch about a hundred thousand new construction projects every month. We're basically seeing the financial transactions on almost every construction project in the nation and so we're seeing the payment behaviors," he said, adding, "We can take those payment behaviors and put that information into everyone's hand to empower them to make decisions, to know who they should be doing business with, what kind of payment terms to expect, what kind of payment terms they can negotiate."
Wolfe sees other industries with layered and fragmented systems where Levelset's platform may be able to someday expand, but he stressed that he believes there's a lot more room to grow within the construction industry.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday that the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in the current fiscal quarter will be sourced from India, while iPads and other devices will come from Vietnam as the company works to avoid the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on its business. Apple’s earnings for the first three months of the year topped Wall Street’s expectations thanks to high demand for its iPhones, and the company said tariffs had a limited effect on the fiscal second quarter’s results. Cook added that for the current quarter, assuming things don’t change, Apple expects to see $900 million added to its costs as a result of the tariffs.
Visa is hoping to hand your credit card to an artificial intelligence “agent” that can find and buy clothes, groceries, airplane tickets and other items on your behalf.
