In construction, the truth gets buried under noise faster than rebar in concrete. One call changes everything, a decision made, a detail missed, and by the time it hits the paperwork, it’s gone. That gap costs contractors millions every year. Hardline just raised $2 million in pre-seed funding to close it for good. Founded in March 2025 and already locking down capital by December, this Los Angeles-based crew isn’t building slowly, they’re building smart.
Congratulations to cofounders Alena Tuttle and Karly-Lynn Heffernan for turning friction into innovation, and props to Suffolk Technologies for backing them through their BOOST 6 accelerator. Hardline’s story starts on the jobsite, not in a boardroom. Karly-Lynn Heffernan, three-time Team Canada Gold Medalist turned construction project manager, spent years managing 50 to 100 calls a day from subs, suppliers, and clients. Each one full of decisions that disappeared the second they hung up. After a career-ending hockey injury, she saw a bigger problem: construction runs on conversation, but the industry has no record of what was said.
Then came Alena Tuttle, a fintech and SaaS operator who scaled a J.P. Morgan product to $300 million AUM in its first year and drove 200% revenue growth at Acorns. Together, they built Hardline, a voice-powered AI that listens like a superintendent and organizes like an analyst. No call recordings. No behavior changes. Just a system that quietly transforms natural jobsite chatter into structured data, tasks, and updates.
Hardline saves construction teams over 13 hours a week by turning noise into knowledge. It’s bilingual, mobile first, and built to survive the chaos of an active site. The AI captures key decisions as they happen, syncing updates across teams through integrations with Procore, Autodesk, and Fieldwire. It’s not software that demands attention, it’s technology that disappears into the workflow, letting people focus on the work that matters.
Within five months of founding, Hardline landed a coveted spot in Suffolk Technologies’ BOOST 6 accelerator, the youngest team ever accepted, ranked among the top 2% of global applicants. Nine months later, the $2 million pre-seed was closed. For a company solving an $11,000-per-change-order problem across a $300 billion U.S. market, that kind of velocity doesn’t just happen, it’s earned.
This round isn’t just capital, it’s validation that the future of construction will be documented in real time, without slowing the people who build it. Hardline doesn’t talk about transformation, it automates it, one conversation at a time.
Startups Startup Funding Early Stage Venture Capital Pre Seed AI Voice AI Construction Construction Tech ConTech Data Data Driven Technology Innovation Tech Ecosystem Startup Ecosystem DCTalks
