As reported in The Globe and Mail, the company now known as Bridgit Inc. began with what founders Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake call “crane hunting” – scouring London, Ont., for construction sites, looking for problems to solve. They found a few. And they’ve raised another $6.2-million to keep solving them.

Bridgit focuses on construction-project management, helping a client base made largely of general contractors keep projects organized with mobile devices; the company says its software is used in as many as 10,000 projects at a given time. It initially began as a tool to help general contractors manage “punch lists” – lists of deficient work at a given site as it nears completion – but in 2018 expanded to earlier-stage inspections to help catch problems more pro-actively.

The fundraising round is being led by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) Women in Technology Venture Fund with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Sands Capital Ventures and Vanedge Capital Partners. The company is also in the process of a debt-financing deal with CIBC Innovation Banking that will bring its total new capital to $7.75-million. Bolstered by this new financing, chief executive Ms. Brodie and chief operating officer Ms. Lake plan to deepen their research-and-development efforts and expand further into their biggest market: the United States.

Started by two women, with a 50-per-cent female team and full pay equity in an otherwise male-dominated tech industry, Bridgit has become a rising-star software company in the competitive Ontario tech community of Kitchener-Waterloo. The founders did this despite neither of them being from the Waterloo region nor coming from a software background. Both studied at the University of Western Ontario in London – Ms. Brodie in business and Ms. Lake in civil engineering – and, in fact, had not known each other until both enrolled in the Next 36 young-entrepreneur program in Toronto in early 2013.

Paired together to pitch a business idea, the co-founders discovered a shared heritage in construction – Ms. Brodie’s family in demolition, Ms. Lake’s family in concrete corrosion mitigation. They hatched an idea to streamline part of the project-management process, but the startup experts they first consulted couldn’t picture construction workers adopting that kind of technology.

Keep reading in The Globe and Mail

 

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