You know that sinking feeling when a phone call from three weeks ago is now costing you six figures? Karly Heffernan does. She lived it.
Before founding Hardline, Karly was taking 30 calls a day while running a commercial construction division. Her family owned a GC, she went to Harvard to play hockey, and found herself right back in construction because she genuinely loves it. But there was this nagging problem.
"I was working the same way my dad was working 15 years ago, taking 30 calls in the vehicle."
Here's what happened: working with a flat roofer, they settled on six inches of insulation, installed it, then the client wanted eight. Nobody documented that first conversation. The roof went on, they ran tests, failed, and had to rip everything off.
"It's really the dispute, the he said, she said, that comes from these calls and the data sharing that just kills companies' margins."
A couple hundred thousand dollars gone because of an undocumented phone call.
The real decisions in construction happen on calls, in trucks, on site. Not in project management software nobody has time to update. Karly looked at Procore, Buildertrend, all the big names. Solid platforms, but the data wasn't getting in.
So she built something different.
"We're solving that by having software that doesn't require behavior change and capturing the data that's never been captured before, which is phone calls."
Hardline is a voice AI platform that listens to your calls, pulls out the construction-specific stuff, and gives you a summary with action items. You don't need a new phone number or to change how you work. The app runs in the background, and at the end of the day, you've got a record of what happened.
"We don't want to be a big brother to the superintendents or project managers. We just want them to have the ability to take calls and then look back at the end of the day."
Karly's in the Suffolk Construction Boost Accelerator (2% acceptance rate), testing with roofers to custom home builders doing $50-100 million a year. Pricing is $49/month for individuals, $129/month per user for teams with integrations.
"Really the amount of time taken to input data and do tedious tasks takes you away from making sure your crews are safe and the projects are moving along. So we're really just trying to take out that pain of input."
This isn't about fancy AI for the sake of AI. It's about solving a real problem that's costing real money, meeting field workers where they are instead of asking them to meet technology where it wants them to be.
About Karly Heffernan
Karly is Cofounder of Hardline, a Santa Monica-based construction tech startup building a voice AI platform that turns jobsite calls into instant summaries, tasks, and documentation.
After graduating from Harvard where she competed with Team Canada's National Women's Hockey Team (U-22), earning three gold medals, she spent four years in construction management seeing how miscommunication spirals into costly rework. Karly is a 2025 Suffolk BOOST accelerator participant, preparing for official launch in January 2026.
Hardline LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/hardline-app
Hardline Website:
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:44 Sound Capital
03:51 From olympic athlete to construction
05:23 Founding Hardline: The Voice AI Platform
06:19 Identifying the problem in construction
14:16 Challenges and solutions
19:37 User experience and adoption
23:56 Launch and future plans
26:53 Partnerships and industry impact
35:45 Final thoughts