The app this Nebraska roofing company built to help its business has become a super tool for contractors nationwide

There are many ways to measure the success of CompanyCam, a Lincoln, Nebraska-based startup unicorn that popularized a photo-focused construction tracking app that’s become popular within the roofing industry.

But one of the clearest signs that its design, utility, and functionality are hitting the mark is the variety of users the app continues to attract.

There are shipbuilders who use it to track how vessels are built and to certify the strength of a hull. Retail merchandisers love the ability to showcase product setups and track subcontractors. Property managers use it to oversee buildings.

“We have some aestheticians—which I think our terms of service say they shouldn’t use us for—doing ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos for CoolSculpting,” said chief financial officer Tullen Mabbutt. “One thing that has always fascinated me about our business is all of the interesting use cases that we never intended to solve.”

The firm grew out of founder Luke Hansen and his family business, White Castle Roofing, which his father started in the 1980s and he took over with his two brothers, Dane and Jake, in the mid-2000s. The Hansen brothers wanted to scale up and expand the firm, and through the process of growing, came up against the challenges of workplace documentation for roofing contractors.

Insurance companies needed detailed images of damaged roofs and the finished repairs. Homeowners wanted to know if the crews on top of their homes were damaging things. And the company had challenges while overseeing multiple crews: getting updates when projects finished, and managing materials and labor flows with quick updates from job sites.

Photos became central to the company’s processes and its reputation locally, and helped back up its motto, “Built by trust, proven by time.” By the late 2000s, before more sophisticated phone photo apps became de rigueur, White Castle crews were carrying a digital camera with an SD card to job sites, tracking work and then sending the photo card back to the office after every shift. 

In 2015, Hansen started searching for an app that could help them handle their contracting and recordkeeping work, and help White Castle progress beyond a shared drive or Dropbox. Disappointed that he couldn’t find a suitable option, he hired a local development studio in Lincoln, Agilx, to develop one, and soon launched CompanyCam. The app offers easy-to-navigate recordkeeping tools—photo annotation, shared files and project records, and in-app communication for workers in the middle of a workday. 

The team soon realized they were on to something when they started seeing the benefit of the live feed that was embedded in the early release, which automatically uploads and syncs photos and video clips from job sites so the entire team can see; now, managers could see exactly when a job was finished, or track work in real time, making it much easier to oversee a large contracting business. 

“What started as a better way to put project photos into folders quickly turned into this accountability, quality management, and project management tool,” Mabbutt said. “All of a sudden, as a business owner, you could sit in the office and know the status of every single project.”

They began marketing it as a general-purpose project management tool, as opposed to one simply for construction contractors, and now CompanyCam boasts users from 30,000-plus companies. 

As the company has grown over the last decade, it’s continued to keep pace with its customer base and technology. Being local and hands-on—the other Hansen brothers still run White Castle Roofing and sit on the board of CompanyCam—gives Hansen insights into product usage and development. Product teams get insight into real user experience questions; when it’s 105 degrees, and a user is 20 feet in the air leaning over a ladder, is it really the right time to ask them to click a button? 

“We think we’re in a unique position, especially with AI, to help contractors get more done from the job site without having to click 10 buttons,” he said. “Contractors spend a lot of time in their truck. We want to act as a field agent that helps them get stuff done while they’re rolling.” 

And they’ve fully embraced AI. It turns out that having a huge database of job site photos gives them a considerable edge when it comes to designing useful artificial intelligence tools. So far, CompanyCam has very practical AI features, like daily project recaps or voice-to-text features that replace the ubiquitous job site notebook. But eventually, the goal is to create a marketing suite that can utilize client photos to help their advertising campaigns. They just launched a generative AI tool to help create project portfolios and conduct marketing via social media. 

After a $415 million raise last August that valued the company at nearly $2 billion, CompanyCam just acquired Beam, a fintech company for contractors, in order to add even more functionality for its user base. But its origins in Lincoln helped it find its identity.

“Early on, being able to cobble together a ragtag group willing to work on this was a huge advantage,” Mabbutt said. “Building a tech company in Nebraska forces this close, collaborative relationship with other tech companies in the area. What we lack in density, we make up for in collectivism, if you will.”

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