THE ORIGIN STORY
It started at a Mexican restaurant
in Oxford, Mississippi.
AJ Davidson and Ben Street became best friends at Ole Miss — the way most best friendships get made in college towns — as regulars at the local Mexican restaurant. Drinking buddies first. Business partners second. That order matters.
One night during finals week — when they should have been hitting the textbooks — Ben told AJ a story about his family's construction operation. A story that still makes them both mad.
THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CLICKED
$50K. Lost. Gone. Just like that — because a general contractor looked at a shoebox full of paper tickets and said, “Unless this proves where the dirt was loaded and unloaded, I’m not paying.”
~ THE STORY THAT STARTED SHOVEL
That was it. That was the moment. Two college kids destined to fail their final exam sat realizing the entire dirt-hauling industry still ran on paper tickets, tally marks, and trust — and that trust broke down every single time real money was on the line.
They ditched their textbooks that night to chart a new course. Not for another construction tech platform — there are plenty of good ones out there. But for the only one that connects the Builder, the Pit, and the Dump Truck on a single app.
Because here's what AJ and Ben knew that Silicon Valley didn't: in this industry, the guy driving the truck matters as much as the GC signing the checks. If your tech isn't easy enough for a dump truck driver to use at 5:30 in the morning before his first haul, it doesn't matter how powerful it is. Nobody's going to use it.
So they built it that way. Accessible. Affordable. Dead simple on the surface — powerful enough underneath to connect a mom-and-pop operation to a billion-dollar GC on the same platform, bringing value to every person in the supply chain.
That was the mission from day one: make the lives of the people who run the industry better, and the value will come naturally.
THAT'S STILL THE MISSION TODAY.
The #1 dirt marketplace connecting Builders, Pits, and Dump Trucks — on demand.
COMPANY