You know that sinking feeling when you realize a phone call from three weeks ago is now costing you six figures? Karly Heffernan does. She lived it.
Before founding Hardline, Karly was doing what a lot of us do: taking 30 calls a day while trying to keep a commercial construction division running. Her family owned a GC, so she grew up on job sites, went to Harvard to play hockey (yeah, that Harvard), and then found herself right back in construction because she genuinely loves it. But there was this nagging problem that kept showing up.
The phone calls. Always the phone calls.
“I was working the same way my dad was working 15 years ago, taking 30 calls in the vehicle.”
That realization hit different when her co-founder pointed it out. Nothing had actually changed in 15 years.
Here’s what happened: she was working with a flat roofer on a project. They went back and forth about insulation depth, settled on six inches, installed it, then the client wanted eight. Except nobody documented that first conversation properly. The roof went on, they ran tests, failed, and had to rip everything off and start over.
“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 a phone call that wasn’t captured.
That’s the thing about construction. The real decisions happen on calls, in trucks, on site. Not in project management software that nobody has time to update. Karly looked at every solution out there: Procore, Buildertrend, all the big names. They’re solid platforms, but the data wasn’t getting into them because field workers don’t have time to sit down and type everything out.
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.”
That’s the core of Hardline.
Hardline is a voice AI platform that listens to your calls, pulls out the construction-specific stuff (not your personal conversations, not your complaints about clients), and gives you a summary with action items. You don’t need a new phone number. You don’t need to change how you work. The app just runs in the background, and at the end of the day, you’ve got a record of what actually happened.
The AI learns your company, your trade, your patterns. It knows the difference between “pick up milk on the way home” and “we need two more inches of insulation on the Peterson project.” It can alert you about commitments, sync with your project management system, and give you something to send to the other person on the call so everyone’s on the same page. No more he said, she said.
Michael and Karly talk through the practical stuff. How does it work if you get a call from your mom? (You can toggle it off mid-call.) Where does the data go?
“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.”
Into a repository you can review later, not recordings that feel like someone’s watching over your shoulder. What’s the learning curve? (Basically none. If you can use your phone app, you’re good.)
They also get into the business side. Karly’s in the Suffolk Construction Boost Accelerator, which is a big deal (2% acceptance rate). They’re working with design partners right now, testing with everyone from roofers to high-volume custom home builders doing $50-100 million a year. That’s the sweet spot: companies that are too small for enterprise solutions but too busy to keep losing money on undocumented conversations.
“We really want people to know that this is a solution for smaller to mid size companies and we’re here to service those people because there’s very few solutions out there that are tackling simple software that’s affordable and adoptable.”
The pricing model is straightforward. For individuals, it’s $49 a month. For teams that want integrations and a full phone system, it’s $129 per user per month. They’re keeping it flexible because construction has those seasonal ebbs and flows.
What’s interesting is how Karly thinks about this. She’s not trying to replace project managers or superintendents.
“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.”
The mental health piece isn’t lost on her either.
“They’re so tired. And I have so much empathy and sympathy for these people on job sites trying to juggle while also dealing with the mental health crisis that’s happening with these people as well.”
The conversation touches on her hockey background too, which honestly isn’t just a fun fact. That mindset of being a few steps ahead, going where the puck is going to be instead of where it is, that’s how she’s approaching this company. She could have gone pro, but women’s hockey wasn’t really a viable career path until recently.
“There was nothing that was stopping me from going to play in the Olympics. And I hadn’t had that until I started this company. I hadn’t had that same excitement to wake up at 5am to get into the office.”
By the end of the episode, you get it. This isn’t about fancy AI for the sake of AI. It’s about solving a real problem that’s costing real money for companies that don’t have money to waste. It’s about meeting field workers where they are instead of asking them to meet technology where it wants them to be.
If you’ve ever lost sleep over a conversation you can’t quite remember, or paid for rework because nobody wrote something down, this one’s worth your time.
About Karly Heffernan
Karly is the Cofounder of Hardline, a Santa Monica-based construction tech startup building the first voice AI platform that turns jobsite calls and conversations into instant summaries, tasks, and documentation.
She grew up on job sites in Alberta, watching her family’s contracting business juggle dozens of calls a day, and found herself doing the same 15 years later, where miscommunication would spiral into costly rework. After graduating from Harvard, where she studied economics and sociology, and competed with Team Canada’s National Women’s Hockey Team (U-22), earning three gold medals, she spent four years in construction management, where she saw firsthand how critical communication impacts job delays and project stays. That frustration inspired her to build Hardline, giving builders a smarter, simpler way to capture conversations and turn them into instant, actionable project data. Karly is a 2025 Suffolk BOOST accelerator participant, part of the top 2% in the global built-world program, and are preparing for their official launch in January 2026.
Hardline LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hardline-app/
Hardline Website: https://www.hardlineapp.com
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