DPR Construction’s venture arm and Suffolk Technologies have made equity investments in Skillit, an AI hiring platform for construction — positioning two of the industry’s most technology-focused general contractors as stakeholders in the labor infrastructure, not just users of it.
The investment amounts were not disclosed. Skillit had raised $13.6 million in total prior to this round, according to Crunchbase. WND Ventures, the venture arm DPR has operated since 2015, and Suffolk Technologies, the $110 million venture platform of Suffolk Construction, both made equity investments alongside the partnership, announced on June 9. Both firms are also Skillit customers — a double role that is less common in construction technology than it should be, and harder to dismiss than a check written on a theme.
What Skillit Is
Skillit operates what it describes as the largest network of vetted craft workers in the United States: 190,000 members across 45 trades and 350 metropolitan areas, according to the company. Rather than running a job board, the platform uses AI agents to match contractors with available, qualified workers by trade, location, and certification. The company says it is growing 7x year-over-year.
Fraser Patterson, Skillit’s founder and CEO, spent three decades in construction before starting the company in 2021. He began as an apprentice carpenter in Scotland, moved through journeyman and ironworker roles, and ran a general contracting business — a path that gives him a particular frame for diagnosing the industry’s hiring problem. His argument is that the industry has been misreading its own data.
“Construction has one of the smallest labor gaps — roughly 5% of demand,” Patterson said in a recent interview. “And yet 94% of construction employers say hiring is their number one problem.” His explanation for the gap between those two figures: the market is opaque, not empty. Workers who are available cannot be found by contractors who need them. The shortage narrative, in Patterson’s framing, is a failure of market infrastructure — not of supply.
That reframe is the whole bet underneath the platform.
The Customer List
Skillit’s existing customer base is its most legible evidence that the access thesis lands in the field. The contractors using it include DPR, Suffolk, Brasfield & Gorrie, Mortenson, Swinerton, Sundt, Lithko, Kiewit, and Obayashi — a cross-section of some of the largest and most technically demanding builders in the country.
These are not early adopters. Mortenson and DPR are among the most prominent data center contractors in the country at a moment when AI infrastructure build-out is driving demand for skilled trades at an unprecedented rate. Kiewit runs some of the most complex infrastructure programs in North America. When builders of this scale and sophistication share a common hiring platform, the most likely explanation is that the alternative — phone trees and word-of-mouth that still govern most craft hiring — has become genuinely unworkable at their volume.
How DPR and Suffolk Are Deploying It
Both investors are deploying Skillit into their own operations, not just their portfolios.
Suffolk is starting through Liberty, its self-perform subsidiary, before expanding to Suffolk’s own hiring and eventually adding administrative roles — project managers, estimators, superintendents — to the platform as Skillit’s coverage widens beyond craft labor. DPR is going national, prioritizing its mission-critical work: the hyperscale data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities where a staffing gap translates directly into a schedule slip.
Patterson said the companies “will work closely with their teams to contribute to and shape our roadmap” — suggesting the partnerships are being structured as product relationships, not just distribution. That is uncommon in construction technology, where enterprise customers and product roadmaps usually run on entirely different calendars.
Why the Investor Identity Matters
WND Ventures has been writing construction technology checks since 2015. Its portfolio has included Dusty Robotics, Rhumbix, and ConstructivIQ. The firm has recently sharpened its focus on AI, supply chain intelligence, and automation — categories where understanding the job site is a prerequisite for evaluating whether a product actually works. Labor infrastructure is a natural extension of that thesis: if you are trying to track every variable that moves a project, the workforce is a large one.
Suffolk Technologies is the most active corporate construction technology investor in the country by AGC Partners’ ranking. Its $110 million fund has backed 55 startups across construction, real estate, and infrastructure. Its portfolio already spans jobsite intelligence, payments, and equipment — and a workforce infrastructure bet is the missing piece of a platform argument about who owns the data layer of construction.
The structure of both investments is the signal worth reading. DPR and Suffolk are not making thematic bets on a labor market they understand abstractly. They are running labor through the product on real projects and writing equity checks based on what they observe. That kind of accountability is uncommon in corporate venture; it also makes the endorsement more informative than a strategic partnership letter.
What to Watch
Skillit’s platform depends on density. A labor marketplace becomes more useful as more workers join it, and more workers join as the marketplace becomes more useful. At 190,000 members and 7x growth, the flywheel is moving but has not yet been proven at full scale. The metric to watch is not the aggregate member count but the depth per market: construction labor is intensely local, and a vetted electrician in Dallas does not solve a staffing problem in Denver. How thick the platform becomes in individual metros — particularly the ones DPR and Suffolk are most active in — will determine whether the growth numbers translate to tangible contractor outcomes.
Patterson’s stated ambition extends the model beyond construction, into manufacturing, energy, defense, and space — industries with the same structural problem of skilled trade work dispersed across geographies with poor information infrastructure. That is a larger canvas than most construction-tech companies paint on. The near-term test is narrower: whether DPR and Suffolk, twelve months into their investment, can point to projects where Skillit measurably shortened the distance between identifying a labor need and filling it. If the answer is yes, the case for treating workforce infrastructure as strategic capital — rather than an HR line item — becomes significantly easier to make.
