Today, we are thrilled to announce that Highwire (formerly ConstructSecure) has raised $96 million in growth capital, led by Summit Partners.
We are excited for our partnership with Summit Partners and their validation of our vision.
I also want to personally thank our employees for their dedication and hard work to get Highwire to where we are today — this is just the beginning of our journey.
You can read the full announcement here.
The Partner Elevation movement
When I joined as CEO last year, I knew that Highwire was helping the world’s leading organizations mitigate partner risk on their capital projects. But over the past year we’ve learned that the nature of these risks — and how they’re addressed — is changing dramatically.
You’re building and operating bigger, more complex projects on more aggressive schedules than ever before.
But an incredibly challenging labor market has limited the supply of skilled workers and experienced supervisors. As a result, the contracting partners you rely on are in short supply.
Which of the following risks are you encountering on an increasing basis?
Source: 2018 AGC/FMI Risk Management Study
This makes traditional contractor qualification untenable. Even if you assess partners upfront, the decision to hire them is often based on other factors, such as their availability, their bids, or existing relationships.
In response, we’re seeing the most successful builders and operators collaborate with partners to dynamically mitigate risk together.
It’s a fundamental shift in mindset: from contractor qualification, to Partner Elevation.
Partner Elevation has become a movement among the most advanced construction firms and asset owners. The way that builders and owners are winning now is by actively collaborating with their contracting partners to boost their capabilities for doing great work.
It’s become clear that traditional contractor prequalification is no longer effective in today’s fast-paced, labor-constrained market. Using the old way of screening contractors before they come onto your worksite and simply assuming that you’ve done enough to mitigate all of the risks they bring has to change.
There is a better way: Partner Elevation.
Partner Elevation allows builders and owners to meet any partner where they are in their risk-mitigation journey and elevate them to do their best work. This shift is happening because it creates a sustainable competitive advantage for these innovative builders and owners, their partners, and their projects.
I’m proud to say that the companies leading this movement use Highwire to elevate their partners.
What’s next for Highwire and the Partner Elevation movement
The investment from Summit Partners is an incredible validation of our Partner Elevation vision and execution. Together, we have the opportunity to make an incredibly positive impact on the safety, viability and sustainability of the entire industry.
Here are the three most important areas that we’ll be investing in right away:
Our platform and your experience
In 2022, we’re continuing to accelerate our investment in the performance of our Partner Elevation Platform, bolstering each application to build a world-class experience. This will enable us to further increase our pace of innovation and bring features to you even faster, which in turn enables you to elevate your partners to do their best work.
You’ll see a number of improvements to our user-interface over the course of 2022. We understand that your ability to engage and collaborate with your partners hinges on the way you interact with our platform, so we’re hyper-focused on creating a modern and intuitive experience for you.
We’re building new integrations to bring data from each part of your software stack into one platform, improving your visibility into partner performance across the entire project lifecycle.
We are working to streamline and simplify the enrollment process to make it easier than ever before to efficiently enroll and assess each potential contracting partner. Expect to see even more improvements to this process, as well as even more Contracting Partner Enablement Specialists who act as an extension of your team during the enrollment process.
Team expansion
In order to drive this product and ecosystem growth, we need to expand our product and go-to-market teams.
In just the past nine months, we have built a new executive leadership team who will be expanding our Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing teams. We have already doubled the number of employees driving the Partner Elevation movement forward and we’ve opened a brand new headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts, but we’re not stopping there. This year, we’re opening a second office in Boise, Idaho and we’ll be increasing our headcount by over 100% in both locations while also hiring the best talent remotely across the country.
Elevating our industry
There are roughly 150,000 injuries on construction job sites every year in the U.S., and over 5,000 construction workers lose their lives. This is the most fatalities of any industry in America. Our industry can and should do better — and we believe Partner Elevation is the framework to do just that.
We’re off to a good start: Highwire is already being used on over $35 billion of combined assets and projects worldwide, with contracting partners in 62 countries. But that isn’t enough. Our vision is to support owners and builders to reduce job site fatalities to zero through elevating their partners to complete their best, safest work.
To achieve this, we will evangelize Partner Elevation through education — explaining what we’ve learned as we have served the leaders of the Partner Elevation movement. We’re focused on sharing the core principles of the Partner Elevation Framework, how to apply it to your operations, and how to infuse the culture of Partner Elevation across your organization. Keep your eye out for more Highwire events in your area, as well as a wealth of digital resources both live and on-demand to help owners and builders understand and utilize Partner Elevation successfully.
This is just the beginning
We’re excited to have this opportunity to reintroduce Highwire to you as the Partner Elevation Platform for builders and owners of capital projects. For those of you who have been with us since the beginning, let me thank you again. We would not be here without your support.
This is just the beginning for us, and we’re going to invest every dollar into creating a world-class Partner Elevation experience for you and your contracting partners.
We have a lot of work to do — and we’re ready for the opportunity.
We hope you’ll join us for the ride.
The Partner Elevation Framework
