Earlytrade, a startup building a working-capital and payments marketplace for the construction industry, has raised $25 million in a Series A round to expand in the United States and weave agentic AI through its platform. The financing was announced on June 9.
The round was led by S3 Ventures. Earlytrade’s marketplace lets general contractors trade working capital with their subcontractors, giving subs faster access to cash while helping the GCs shore up their supply chains.
A 60-to-90-day problem
The company is taking aim at one of construction’s most stubborn frictions: payment delays. Subcontractors in the United States’ $2 trillion-plus construction industry routinely wait 60 to 90 days to get paid, and surveys cited by the company suggest roughly 70% of contractors and subcontractors treat late payment as a matter of course.
“Every dollar that flows through a construction project passes through a payment bottleneck that has never been solved at scale,” said Charlie Plauche, the S3 Ventures partner who led the deal.
Agents on the money
Earlytrade plans to deploy AI agents across its payments ecosystem to automate the slow, document-heavy back-and-forth that governs who gets paid and when. Originally founded in Australia and since re-incorporated in the U.S., the company is positioning the Series A as fuel for an American expansion built on what it calls a proven two-sided marketplace.
If it works, that agentic-AI layer could turn Earlytrade from a financing tool into something closer to an autonomous treasury for the job site — the kind of unglamorous infrastructure that, in construction, often matters most.