Pune: For 32-year-old Lesh Dixit, a delayed home renovation proved to be a boon. It provided him deeper insights into a larger problem which spurred him on to fix it.
In 2019, Dixit decided to renovate his Bengaluru house. What should have been a fairly predictable project stretched nearly three months beyond schedule. At first, he blamed the contractor. It seemed like one of those experiences almost every homeowner has faced.
Around the same time, he visited his parents’ place, where his father was building a house. This project, too, was facing the same problem. It was running behind schedule by three to four months.
Two projects, two cities, two completely unrelated sets of people, but the same outcome.
Dixit, CEO and co-founder of Powerplay, said, “ “That is when it stopped looking like bad luck and more like a pattern.”
Birth of Powerplay
What intrigued him was a simple question: If small residential projects could go so badly off schedule, what was happening to projects that were a hundred times larger?
That question eventually led to the launch of Powerplay, a construction management technology company, in 2020 by Dixit and Shubham Goyal, both IIT Roorkee alumni.
From a mobile-first site management tool, Powerplay has since expanded into project and financial management,procurement, artificial intelligence and embedded credit.
At the heart of the business is a problem that sounds deceptively simple: different parts of a construction project often do not have the same information at the same time.
“The answer was almost absurdly simple. Nobody knew what was happening,” said Dixit. “The site knew one version, the office knew another, and the two only met when something had already gone wrong.”
For an industry of construction’s scale, the tools being used to manage this information were surprisingly basic. Site teams depended heavily on registers, handwritten notes, phone calls and WhatsApp groups.
An anomaly
Dixit noticed an anomaly. Most major industries had gradually built software around their core workflows. But, construction, despite being one of India’s largest employers, had not undergone the same transition.
The reason was not that construction workers or contractors were inherently resistant to technology. The problem was that much of the software being designed did not fit the reality of a construction site.
A supervisor standing amid dust, machinery, workers and constant interruptions is unlikely to spend several minutes completing a complicated digital form.
“Everything had to be mobile-first and finishable in seconds,” Dixit said. “Photos, not text. A handful of decision-driving fields, not long forms.”
That understanding shaped Powerplay’s earliest product decisions.
On-site learning
Both Dixit and Goyal knew software development, but learning how construction actually worked required something different. They spent considerable time at project sites, watching supervisors, contractors and teams work.
“What it really took was proximity,” Dixit said. “Every design decision we got right came from watching, not from a product meeting.”
The founders identified visibility as the central gap. Major construction delays and cost overruns were often not caused by one catastrophic decision. Instead, dozens of smaller decisions were made too late because the right person did not have the right information at the right time.
Powerplay, therefore, began with communication and site visibility, helping teams monitor areas such as tasks, labour and material.
The founders also chose an unusual route to validate their product. Rather than begin by aggressively selling software to company management, they made the product available to contractors and watched whether site teams would use it voluntarily.
“We validated it the only way that counts – by putting a free product in front of contractors and seeing whether they used it without anyone asking them to,” Dixit said.
And, they did!
App gains popularity
Within months of launch, according to Dixit, tens of thousands of contractors across hundreds of Indian cities were using the app. More importantly, adoption often travelled upwards. Site teams began using the software first and subsequently brought office teams onto the platform.
For the founders, that bottom-up adoption was important evidence that they were solving a genuine operational problem rather than pushing another enterprise software product onto reluctant users.
The first version went live in late 2020, just months after the company was started. Construction may be considered a slow-moving industry, but Dixit discovered that the feedback cycle for software used on a site can be extremely quick.
“Either a supervisor uses your app tomorrow or he does not,” Dixit said. “That forced us to ship early and correct fast.”
The product has gone through what Dixit describes as too many iterations to count. But its evolution can broadly be divided into three phases.
The first concentrated on communication and site visibility, including labour, material and task management.
The second moved further into the office, adding project management, financial management and procurement.
The third, now underway, is focused heavily on artificial intelligence and embedded credit.
Rather than treating these as unrelated businesses, Powerplay sees them as extensions of the same underlying construction problem.
“You cannot fix delays without fixing procurement, you cannot fix procurement without fixing cash flow, and you cannot fix cash flow without fixing access to credit,” said Dixit.
That progression has gradually transformed Powerplay from a project management application into something much more ambitious: a platform that wants to sit underneath a contractor’s entire business.
Commercial strategy
The company’s commercial strategy reflects its bottom-up beginnings.Its model is product-led at the base and high-touch at the top. Site teams can discover and begin using the free product independently. As organisations seek more advanced capabilities, Powerplay’s teams engage more closely with mid-market contractors.
Dixit compares the pattern of adoption to workplace collaboration tools, where individuals or teams begin using a product and adoption later spreads across the company.
“Our first sales were less about selling and more about someone already using the free product, deciding they wanted more of it,” he said.
Yet for a technology company, Powerplay has also embraced an unusually physical growth strategy.
Trainers and customer-success teams visit clients periodically, often every three to four months, to understand whether the software is delivering value on actual sites.
“In an industry obsessed with scaling digitally, going offline has been one of our real growth levers,” Dixit said.
That approach affects hiring too. Powerplay began with a small team and has since grown to over 100 employees. But, according to Dixit, construction technology requires more than conventional software talent.
“You need people willing to stand on a site in the afternoon heat and understand why a supervisor does something in a particular way,” he said.
Some of the company’s strongest employees, he added, have been those who extended their role beyond the job description because they saw something that needed to be done.
Monetisation
Today, Powerplay monetises through three principal areas.
The first is subscriptions to its premium platform, covering functions including project, financial and procurement management.
The second is what the company describes as an AI workforce — domain-trained artificial- intelligence agents designed for areas such as estimation, procurement, project management and finance.
The third is embedded credit, through which Powerplay finances material purchases within the procurement workflow.
For contractors, access to working capital can be as important as project management. Many smaller and mid-sized businesses have historically relied on supplier credit, often because formal lenders do not possess enough information to accurately assess them. Powerplay believes its accumulated project data can help change that.
Over approximately five years, Dixit said, the platform has tracked more than 85,000 projects, 40,000 payment cycles, two million material deliveries and over 150,000 vendor profiles. That information gives Powerplay a view of contractor activity and behaviour that traditional lenders may not possess.
Venture funded
The company is venture funded. Its investors included India Quotient, Accel, Sequoia’s Surge and angel investors Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. Publicly reported funding through its Series A is around $13 million, although the exact cumulative figure, including subsequent rounds, remains to be confirmed.
Financially, Powerplay crossed a $10 million annualised gross revenue run rate as of March 2026. In rupee terms, its annualised revenue at exit increased from approximately ₹38 crore in March 2025 to around ₹95 crore this year.
Dixit said revenue grew about fourfold over the previous year, with much of the acceleration occurring in the preceding six months as the credit business expanded.
The company also has a presence in Pune. According to Powerplay, Pune contributes approximately 10-15 per cent of its overall business, with customers across residential and commercial construction, infrastructure, manufacturing, EPC, solar and specialised contracting segments.
Next stage of growth
The next stage of Powerplay’s growth will require more capital, and the company is planning to raise additional funding.
Dixit said the capital requirement comes particularly from two areas — AI and distribution. Building domain-specific AI for construction is not, in his view, a matter of simply plugging a general-purpose model into an application.
“Building domain-trained agents for estimation, procurement and risk is not a software problem you solve once,” he said. “It requires sustained investment in data, model work and people who understand construction deeply enough to teach a system what a good estimate actually looks like.”
That is one of the reasons he describes AI development as a multi-year project. AI is already beginning to change Powerplay’s sales proposition as well.
Traditional software often requires contractors to alter behaviour, enter structured data and learn new workflows. AI potentially reverses that equation by allowing software to work with information construction teams already produce — drawings, photographs and other relatively unstructured inputs.
“AI does not require contractors to learn something and structure their data,” Dixit said. “It works with the drawings, photos and messy inputs construction already produces.”
One area where he sees an immediate productivity opportunity is estimating. “Work that took an estimator two weeks earlier now takes minutes, because AI can read multiple drawings at once,” he said. “An estimator who produced one estimate now handles 20.”
For Powerplay, the other major opportunity is financial distribution. The company wants to become the technology layer through which formal lenders can reach contractors they historically struggled to underwrite.
Once project activity, procurement, payments and vendor relationships are visible digitally, the contractor becomes easier to assess. Financing can then be embedded directly into the point at which the business requires, such as purchasing materials.
However, Dixit does not see credit as the end goal. “Once a contractor runs their entire business on Powerplay, the platform becomes the natural place to transact for everything the business needs,” he said. “Materials and financing are simply the first two categories.”
‘Deeper, not wider’
Near term, Powerplay is targeting ₹700 crore in annualised volume and roughly fivefold growth by FY2027, driven largely by deeper financing penetration among its existing contractor base. Its immediate focus is, therefore, “deeper rather than wider”. That means scaling the credit business while moving AI capabilities from beta-stage and assisted usage towards more reliable self-service products.
Some functions such as risk and timeline prediction are currently being run manually by the Powerplay team for selected customers. Turning these capabilities into scalable products is one of its next challenges.
Beyond the company’s commercial targets lies the much bigger context of India’s construction requirement. Dixit pointed to the enormous amount of infrastructure India will need over the coming years — from homes and hospital beds to schools, roads and railways.
The challenge, he said, is not merely finding enough money to build them. Construction productivity itself will have to improve.
His expectation is that technology — and particularly AI — will eventually become so integrated into construction that companies will stop thinking of it as a separate tool.
“In five years, I expect AI to be invisible in construction,” he said. “Nobody will say they are using AI for estimation the way nobody says they use the internet for email. It will simply be how projects run.”
Powerplay wants to be the underlying operating system for that transition, particularly for the mid-market contractors who form a substantial part of India’s construction ecosystem.
Its bet is that the same platform can eventually connect project execution, AI-driven productivity, procurement, financing and transactions.
For Dixit, that ambition takes Powerplay back to the problem that started with two delayed houses. What initially looked like unreliable contractors was actually a symptom of an information and coordination gap across a much larger industry.
Now, the question Powerplay is trying to answer is no longer merely how to get one project completed on time. It is how technology can allow thousands of contractors to build more efficiently at a time when the country itself needs to build at unprecedented scale.
“If we get that right, we are not just growing a company,” said Dixit. “We are expanding the country’s capacity to build.”
