Construction & Real Estate Intelligence
Intelligence built by people who are from the trades
North Labs builds intelligence infrastructure for construction—not from a whiteboard, but from years on job sites.
North Labs builds intelligence infrastructure for construction—not from a whiteboard, but from years on job sites.
Every bid you analyze, every vendor you work with, every project you close—that's your data, your patterns, your hard-won knowledge. It should compound for you, not train someone else's intelligence.
Construction companies generate enormous amounts of operational data, but it all flows into SaaS tools that give you dashboards and keep the intelligence. Your vendor history. Your bid patterns. Your margin outcomes. It's your data—but it's building someone else's moat.
We believe companies should own their intelligence infrastructure the same way they own their equipment. Not as a subscription that disappears when you stop paying. As an asset that appreciates with every project.
That's what we're building. Intelligence that compounds for the people who generate it. Every project that runs through TradeSmith makes the system smarter—specifically for your firm.
ChatGPT doesn't know that fire caulk is always excluded. It doesn't understand why that $612K plumbing bid might actually cost you $900K. We do—because we've lived it. Every model we build encodes construction knowledge, not just language patterns.
Dashboards don't change behavior. Tools people have to remember to check don't get checked. Real intelligence shows up where decisions happen—in email, in meetings, in the systems your team already uses. We don't 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 only sees one silo is half-blind. We connect everything—not to replace your tools, but to make them smarter together.
Our model is designed to extract value. We align our success with yours: investment tied to contract volume, not headcount. When you win projects, we win. When you protect margin, that's real money—not a line item we're trying to maximize.
Upload any PDF, Excel, or email chain. TradeSmith reads it like a senior estimator—normalizing line items, catching scope gaps, and auto-leveling 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 GCs ($300M+ annual volume).
High manual overhead in bid reviews and a recurring issue with "buried" exclusions leading to six-figure change orders during the WIP phase.
Phase 1: North Labs integrated TradeSmith with their Procore and Sage instances, training the intelligence layer on five years of historical bids.
Phase 2: Deployed the Bid Intelligence module to auto-level trade packages and identify outliers.
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's where I learned what construction actually is.
Not the sanitized version in software demos. The real thing. A missed spec that blows margin. A scope gap that turns into a fight. A schedule that slips because one detail got overlooked. The right sub who can save a job—and the wrong one who can sink it. Relationships that matter because you'll see the same people on the next project, and the one after that.
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.
You learn that the people closest to the work usually know what's broken first. You learn to keep plans simple enough to survive reality. You learn that precision under pressure isn't optional—it's the job.
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. They deserve systems that reduce manual work, prevent mistakes, and protect margin. They deserve intelligence that fits construction as it is—not as a software company wishes it was.
Here's what that means in practice:
Intelligence that's embedded in your operations, not sitting in a dashboard you forget to check. Systems that integrate with the tools you already use. Intelligence that learns from every project and turns hard-earned experience into permanent company knowledge—owned by the contractor, not rented from a vendor, not shared with competitors.
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.
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.
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