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.
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Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year. The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion. The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin..
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading. That is according to wealth tracker Bloomberg. A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who had been the world’s richest for four years. The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle. Forbes still has Musk as the richest, however, valuing his private businesses much higher.
