So you're a developer trying to get an update on a $100 million project. All you need is one phone call from the field. Sounds easy.
Then the call goes "great." Meaning it goes to voicemail. The voicemail disappears into the same black hole as every unanswered email, and three days later you still have no idea whether the utility work is done, the grading crew showed up, or the schedule is slipping.
Congratulations. Phone tag is now part of your accounting process.
Meanwhile, the WIP report is getting stale. Billing is held up. A small information gap can become a very expensive problem. This happens on construction sites every day. The people with the answers are busy building, and the people running the books are stuck chasing them.
Adaptive sends an AI agent to do the chasing. During our demo, it picked up the phone and called us.
That phone call is part of a much larger construction accounting platform. Adaptive's agents code invoices, build WIP reports, chase lien waivers, prepare billings, and contact the field whenever accounting needs an answer.
We sat down with co-founder and CEO Matt Calvano to see how far "the agent handles the coordination" actually goes.
Lock in. This is a good one.
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| So, what is Adaptive? |
Adaptive is an AI-native project accounting platform built for construction: general contractors, specialty trade subcontractors, developers, homebuilders, and the accounting firms behind them, typically doing $5M to $1B in annual revenue. It runs as a virtual project accountant, ingesting invoices, coding costs to the right job and cost code, routing approvals, tracking lien waivers, building WIP reports, and updating cash forecasts across every active job at once.
Matt breaks project accounting into four core jobs:
Billings
WIP
Compliance (lien waivers and insurance certificates)
Job costing
Adaptive builds a team of digital agents around those jobs, each one configured to a client's own processes during onboarding, with the prompts, skills, memories, and integrations all engineered by Adaptive's team. The numbers flow in through direct integrations: a two-way connection with Procore, ERPs like QuickBooks and Sage Intacct, your email inbox, your credit cards, your bank accounts.
And one rule holds across the entire platform: the AI never posts to the general ledger on its own. A human reviews and approves before anything touches the books.
Adaptive currently lists 7 project accounting agents:
A WIP and forecasting analyst that keeps budgets, margin, revenue, and cash forecasts current
An AP clerk that reads invoices, codes costs, and routes bills for approval
A billings clerk that assembles cost-plus, fixed-price, and AIA billing packages
A change order clerk that watches for change events and follows the paperwork through approval
A lien waiver clerk that chases subcontractors and suppliers by email, text, or phone
An insurance clerk that collects certificates and flags expirations
A field coordinator that calls superintendents and PMs for the information accounting still needs
Plus, custom agents can be configured around a company's own workflows.
| How Adaptive got Built |
Matt paid his way through Michigan State running a painting company. A good summer meant enough profit to buy his girlfriend a laptop for her birthday. Then came the finance track: real estate investment banking at Morgan Stanley, private equity at KSL Capital, and Stanford for business school with one goal, to start a company.
That's what we call "LEGEND."
The first product Matt built was a zoning and entitlements tool for developers. While selling it, Matt kept asking construction owners the same question: what are the top three problems in your business? (Entrepreneurs, us included, take note.) The answers kept circling one thing. In his words: "I don't know whether my projects are profitable until the end. I double-paid my subcontractors. I forgot to bill for an expense. I forgot to get a change order approved till the end, and the client thought I was trying to scam them."
So before writing a line of code, Matt and his co-founders moved to Austin, rented an Airbnb, and ran an actual bookkeeping firm for construction companies. LEGEND.
They charged a couple thousand a month, did the books by hand, and learned the problem from the inside. Matt's joke about it now: "I'm probably one of the world's top experts in QuickBooks accounting."
| Why Construction Accounting Breaks |
To normal folk, construction accounting sounds complex. Matt says the actual math is simple.
What buries accountants is that every answer they need lives with someone in the field. "Should you pay a sub's invoice?" Depends what actually got done on site this month. "Which cost code does a messy bill land on?" Depends on the PM's budget. "How much do you bill?" Depends on percent complete and pending change orders. As Matt put it: "The accountants are constantly blocked in their ability to get work done, waiting on the field." Why? Because every answer lives with a different person.
Every system before Adaptive was built solely for the office or solely for the field. Nothing bridged the two. Adaptive is the bridge, and that bridge is the entire company.
| The Phone Call |
Matt typed one instruction into the platform: "Call Quinn and ask him for an update on the Atlantic HQ project." I read out my cell number (please, do us a favor, and don't call it). The agent took a few seconds to boot up, reviewing every file, number, and person tied to the job (a demo project, of course). Then my phone rang.
I answered as the field contact and gave it a mess: utilities still not connected, my grading subcontractor missing for four weeks, the job roughly $1,000,000 backlogged, and the publicly traded homebuilder waiting on finished lots getting angry. The agent asked a follow-up I didn't expect, whether the grading delay had affected any pay apps or final billing, confirmed it had the full picture, and ended the call.
Then Matt showed me where it all went. Every piece of that call, the delay, the dollar figure, the sub at fault, got tagged to the project and the vendors and saved into what Adaptive calls company context. On the next check-in cycle, the agent already knows to open with the grading delay. The update lives in the system instead of dying in someone's inbox.
| What else stood out? |
The WIP report writes itself. The report every construction finance team dreads each month (current budgets, costs to date, billings, plus a narrative on what changed) usually means the CFO emailing every project manager and waiting days for replies. Adaptive's WIP agent runs the entire cycle: it pulls the numbers already in the system, calls or texts the field for anything missing, and produces a written narrative plus an Excel report in whatever format the client already uses.
The data compounds. Most accounting systems can tell you a forecast changed. They can't tell you why. Adaptive threads every call, every delay, and every sub who showed up late into company context. Ask which project managers consistently sandbag their forecasts and it answers from history. Ask which subcontractors keep hitting you with change orders for scope they left out of their contracts, and it knows that too. This is what we like to call... institutional memory. Ask Adaptive which sub is typically a sourpuss? Yup, it knows that too.
It protects you from liens. Yes, a sub, or anyone who has worked on your project, can put a lien on your property. Most owners never find out until a refinance or a sale, when a lender or buyer finds it first. So one of Adaptive's agents calls everyone who worked on the job and asks one question: "Did you get paid?" Hundreds of calls, made automatically, and the problem gets caught before it becomes a lien.
Why no other software solved this. Every other tool tries to get field crews to type updates into an app. "Put 100 people on a job site and maybe 40 fill out the daily log on time," Matt says. The rest never do. Adaptive gave up on that approach entirely. Instead of waiting for people to log in, the agent goes to them with a call, a text, or an email, whichever each person actually answers.
| Adaptive by the Numbers |
Adaptive launched in February 2023. Since then:
1,000+ construction companies run on the platform, with billions in annual construction volume flowing through it.
$26.4M raised: a $19M Series A led by Emergence Capital, a seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, and checks from founders and executives at Brex and Ramp. Do we need to say it again? LEGEND!
An NPS of 80. For back-office software, that number almost doesn't happen.
Best of IBS Award for Business Solution Software at the 2026 NAHB International Builders' Show.
Named to Construction Executive's 2026 Top Construction Technology Products list for accounting and job costing.
CTO Henry Bradlow came from SpaceX, where he wrote flight algorithms for rockets. Now that big brain of his is pointed at job costing.
The industry has room for it, and the proof is in the pudding. Construction loses an estimated $273 billion a year to payment delays and cash flow problems.
And Matt is clear on what the agents are for: "I don't expect AI to actually replace the judgment itself. I just expect it to dramatically amplify and accelerate that judgment." The agent takes on the data chasing. The accountant keeps the job they signed up for.
| Case Studies |
Adaptive publishes a growing set of customer stories. These figures come from the company and its customers. We treat them as reported results and have not independently audited them. Even with that caveat, the before-and-after is hard to ignore:
Sustainable 9 Design + Build says Adaptive cut a billing cycle from more than 80 hours to about two. It also recovered thousands of dollars in missed receipts and described the total impact as a six-figure difference.
Adams-Bickel Associates, a $40 million GC, reduced monthly bill processing from roughly a week and a half to one day.
Bean Co Homes reports saving 30 staff hours a week. Its draw preparation fell from nearly a full day to minutes, and the company says it doubled project volume without adding accounting headcount.
Quinndico Custom Home Builders reports cutting its bank draw process from three days to three hours.
AI For CRE’S Take
The phone call is a real innovation, and the reason has nothing to do with novelty. Construction's data problem was never going to be solved by convincing 100 field guys to log into the same app on time. Adaptive stopped waiting for that and built an agent that goes and gets the answer. Every answer it collects makes the system smarter about that project, that PM, and that vendor. That dataset compounds daily, and it's Adaptive's moat.
The trust design is the other aspect we really, really like. A polished answer means very little when real money is about to move. Nothing posts to the GL and no pay app goes out without a human signing off.
Full transparency: the first demo call dropped and had to be redialed, and Atlantic HQ was a demo project with me playing the field. The mechanic still did exactly what Matt said it would. One thing we didn't do is trace a WIP number back through every supporting source ourselves, so put that on your checklist when you test the platform.
Adaptive is built for construction operations. If you're an owner, investor, or broker with no construction back office, this is not a tool you'd buy. But developers still feel it secondhand: a GC on Adaptive means cleaner draws, faster billing, and a verified compliance trail flowing up to you. And it shrinks the gap between something going wrong on site (a schedule slip, an unsigned change order) and the moment your finance team actually sees it. That gap is where the expensive surprises live.
It's also not self-serve (which is bad, but in this case, also kind of good). Each client's agents get configured around their own workflows during a 30-to-90-day implementation, contracts run month-to-month, and pricing means talking to sales.
The biggest hurdle is the one thing a demo can't prove: whether your field teams will answer when the agent calls. Meeting people on their preferred channel is the right design, but job site adoption is the question to pressure-test when you're rolling Adaptive out.
For the companies in its lane, this is one of the most complete agent platforms we've seen actually deployed in construction. Maybe the most.
Adaptive is AI FOR CRE Approved. Bravo.
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Data centers could consume 20% of US electricity by 2035: A sharply higher BloombergNEF forecast shows how AI infrastructure demand is colliding with power availability, grid constraints, and local opposition.
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BONUS: “You can’t sell an AI brain!”
The sharpest moment of the conversation had nothing to do with accounting. Everyone in tech right now is pitching some version of an AI brain. Matt's response: try walking onto a job site with that. "Imagine I show up, you've never met me before, and I say I'm gonna give you this big brain that's gonna know everything about your projects. That is not, in my opinion, the way to sell it."
Adaptive sells the boring thing instead. Let us automate the specific manual task you hate: the WIP report, the invoice coding, the lien waiver chase. Then every automated task quietly captures data, and the brain assembles itself over time. Matt calls it the knock-on benefit of the agents operating.
His version of the playbook, and every AI company should hear it: "You gotta make it concrete. You gotta tie it to specific outcomes. You gotta deliver against those outcomes."
Swap "construction company" for "brokerage" or "PE shop" and the lesson holds across all of CRE. Nobody buys intelligence in the abstract. They buy their worst workflow off their plate, and the intelligence shows up as a side effect.
TRY ADAPTIVE YOURSELF
Take a look at Adaptive and book a walkthrough on your own project data. Matt's email is on the site if you want to talk through how this could apply to a development or GC relationship you're already in.
PRICING
Adaptive doesn't publish pricing. Contracts run month-to-month, and implementation typically takes 30 to 90 days depending on your existing systems and workflows, since each client's agents get configured around their own processes. Book a demo above for a real quote.
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