Women-founded Hardline raises $2M from Mucker Capital for speech-based construction tech
Construction communication failures cost billions of dollars annually, a problem that a new voice-first startup aims to tackle with a fresh injection of venture capital. Hardline, co-founded in 2025 by Alena Tuttle and Karly Heffernan, has secured $2 million in pre-seed funding to convert the industry’s endless stream of phone calls and on-site conversations into structured project records.
Funding and investors
The round was led by Mucker Capital, with participation from StandUp Ventures, Suffolk Technologies, Nirman Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. The announcement was made on 20 May 2026. The Santa Monica-headquartered startup will use the capital to deepen software integrations, accelerate product development, expand across the small and medium-sized business construction market, and scale the telephony infrastructure at the core of its platform.
The cost of poor communication
The construction industry loses tens of billions of dollars each year because of poor communication and incomplete documentation, making workflow automation a rapidly growing segment within construction technology. Hardline’s founders argue that the most critical project information often never makes it into formal systems of record — it lives in calls, conversations and quick decisions made on site. “The problem has never been that supers and PMs don’t know what’s happening on their jobs — it’s that they spend half their day documenting it after the fact, hunched over a laptop in a job trailer,” said Karly Heffernan, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree in the Manufacturing & Industry category. Her own background includes playing for Team Canada and Harvard, and she experienced the chaos of managing projects while taking 50 to 100 calls a day.
How the platform converts voice to structured data
Hardline’s platform captures audio from jobsite phone calls and on-site discussions, then automatically transforms those conversations into structured documentation — including requests for information, punch lists, change orders, task assignments and daily logs. The system uses voice AI to make the “voice layer” of construction legible to project management software for the first time. Co-founder Alena Tuttle explained: “We are not asking field crews to change anything. We meet them where they already are — on the phone. The voice layer of construction has been invisible to project management software until now. Hardline makes it legible.”
The technology supports both English and Spanish, reflecting the multicultural nature of construction workforces. Speech recognition is becoming mission-critical in the industry due to labour shortages and the need to boost productivity. To strengthen its technical capabilities, Hardline appointed Kimball Hill as chief technology officer; he previously worked as a senior AI engineer at Klarity, where he built multi-agent systems and enterprise AI tooling for large-scale data analytics deployments. The company’s long-term vision is to remove keyboards from construction workflows entirely and make voice the primary interface for the jobsite.
Integrations and market positioning
Hardline integrates directly with widely used construction software, including Procore, Autodesk Forma, and Hilti’s Fieldwire. The startup is already operational across 10 US states and two countries, serving commercial contractors, residential builders and specialty trades. Competitors in the construction tech space include OpenSpace, which focuses on reality capture and site documentation; Buildots, known for AI-driven project tracking; and Versatile, which uses crane and site data to improve operational visibility. Hardline, however, is betting that voice data — often ignored by existing platforms — represents a major untapped layer of project intelligence.
“One of the consistent challenges we see in the field is that the most important project information doesn’t always make it into systems of record. It lives in calls, conversations, and quick decisions on-site,” said Parker Mundt, partner and head of platform at Suffolk Technologies. Suffolk Technologies, ranked by the Associated General Contractors of America as the most active construction tech investor from 2018 to 2025, selected Hardline for its 2025 BOOST Accelerator program. The startup was part of the BOOST 6 cohort, which ran for eight weeks and culminated in a Demo Day on 19 November in Boston, and has also received recognition from BuiltWorlds and the International Builders’ Show.
Michelle McBane, managing director at StandUp Ventures, which focuses on women-led businesses, said: “Alena and Karly are precisely the kind of founders we love to invest in – creative, committed to excellence, and using their industry insider know-how to be first to market with a novel and entirely modern solution that is seamless for its users.” Gregg Wallace, general partner at Nirman Ventures, which began backing Hardline early last year and increased its commitment this round, added: “The administrative burden on field managers is real, expensive, and getting worse as back-office headcount shrinks — and field users often skip daily reports simply because the flow of work doesn’t stop. A voice-first tool that slots into the platforms builders already use, without a learning curve, is exactly the future we see for field input. Hardline is pulling that future forward.”
Hardline is already active across 10 states and two countries, serving commercial contractors, residential builders, and specialty trades.
