We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund IV has completed an investment in Dalton Mills, a platform redefining vertical SaaS for the trades by enabling contractors and operators to build deeply customized software on shared infrastructure rails. The trades represent a massive and historically underserved software market, with more than 10 million businesses operating across a $1.5 trillion economy in the United States alone. While incumbent vertical SaaS companies have built valuable businesses serving broad categories like HVAC, plumbing, and flooring, they have struggled to economically support the highly specialized workflows and edge cases that define how individual operators actually run their businesses. Recent advances in AI-assisted development and inference-driven workflows have fundamentally changed the economics of software customization, creating an opportunity for a new kind of platform purpose-built for the long tail of vertical software demand.

Dalton Mills is building a horizontal operating system for the trades that becomes “the most vertical software any contractor has ever used.” The platform combines shared operational infrastructure including CRM, quoting, scheduling, dispatch, invoicing, and accounting integrations with AI-driven workflow customization and an open builder ecosystem that allows operators to create highly specialized plugins for their industries. Rather than forcing every contractor into a rigid monolithic system, Dalton Mills enables businesses to shape the software around their own workflows and operational nuances. The company believes this creates a powerful network effect: every new builder and plugin increases the platform’s vertical depth, strengthens retention, and expands its marketplace ecosystem. By combining platform economics with hyper-specific customization, Dalton Mills aims to create a fundamentally more flexible and extensible alternative to incumbent trade software platforms.

Dalton Mills is led by a team with deep firsthand experience building software in the trades. The founders previously built one of the largest vertical SaaS platforms in the flooring industry and experienced the structural limitations of traditional vertical software companies firsthand. Their experience operating inside the industry gave them unique insight into the “long tail” of unmet software demand among contractors and trade professionals. Beyond product vision, the team also brings strong community-building experience and a differentiated go-to-market strategy centered around empowering what they call “Blue Collar Builders” operators within the trades who can now use AI-assisted tools to create software tailored to their own industries. We’re excited to support Dalton Mills as they work to build the operating system and builder ecosystem powering the next generation of trade software.

‍Why we’re excited about Dalton Mills

This is the second company founded by Todd Saunders, the first of which Matchstick backed in Fund I and was a sizable exit. We know Todd very well and think he is one of the best leaders we’ve worked with. We knew he wasn’t done, even though his prior company did quite well, as he’s a true builder/entrepreneur, and so we stayed close to him to see what he was going to do next. He’s one of those founders you consider giving a blank check to. When he said he was starting a company, we instantly dove in because he’s someone we want to fund again. And, we love this concept. We’ve long had a thesis on “diagonal SaaS”, the concept that AI enables customized software for niche/long tail industries and/or personalized UI on existing systems. Todd (and Sean’s) idea is exactly in line with that opportunity, and who better to go after it than them.

We decided to do an Access Check into this round because the price was high and outside our comfort range. The founders also now live on the East Coast, so it’s outside our geo focus. We still wanted to participate because we think this could be a huge company, we have access to it, and we have high conviction in the leadership team and market. 

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