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.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
