A Nebraska startup has attained coveted “unicorn” status after raising the largest single equity investment in the history of the state’s startup ecosystem.
Local economic development and policy leaders tout the achievement as a major milestone that counters the narrative that founders need to leave Nebraska to find the talent and capital it takes to scale a startup to the highest level.
In August, CompanyCam, a Lincoln-based construction site documentation and project management platform, announced a Series C funding round led by international venture capital firm B Capital.
Leaders at CompanyCam declined to disclose the amount of the round. However, data from private capital market research platform PitchBook shows the investment totaled $415 million, which makes it the largest single equity investment round (excluding debt financing) in Nebraska startup history.
According to PitchBook’s unicorn tracker, CompanyCam, after the latest round of funding, is now valued at $2 billion. That catapulted the company to unicorn status, which in the startup world is a privately held company that is valued at $1 billion or more. That’s a first for any startup founded in Nebraska.
“It’s a remarkable achievement for a company that’s 10 years old,” said Dan Hoffman, the CEO of Invest Nebraska, a nonprofit venture development organization that was an early investor in the startup. “Being the first unicorn starting off as an idea in 2015 and reaching this milestone in the year 2025 furthers the ecosystem knowing that these types of companies can be built in Nebraska.”
Hoffman said that CompanyCam’s success is a nod to the early stage capital and talent available right here in Nebraska.
Tech Nebraska Executive Director Emily Allen agreed. “CompanyCam’s achievement marks a defining moment for Nebraska’s tech ecosystem,” Allen said in an email. “Reaching a $2B valuation demonstrates that world-class innovation can originate and thrive in our state.”
CompanyCam CEO Luke Hansen founded the startup in 2015 in response to a challenge he faced in his family’s roofing business.
In an excerpt from an interview with SPN that year, he said, “I built this as a solution for a problem we were having at White Castle Roofing. I had searched on and off for months, trying to find software that would help us manage jobs better, and I found a few that kind of, sort of worked, but ultimately just decided that if I couldn’t find something that could do what I wanted, I would just create it myself.”
The CompanyCam app launched in the iTunes marketplace (now the App Store) on July 1, 2015. The original version used photos and GPS to help contractors monitor the progress of all their job sites — instantly, from anywhere. In the process of solving his own problem, Hansen created a solution that appealed to other contractors. And his background in the industry positioned him as a compelling first salesperson for CompanyCam.
Today, the CompanyCam app has more than 21,000 reviews and a 4.8 star rating in the App Store.
In 2016, CompanyCam was awarded a $50,000 Prototype Grant under the recently halted state Business Innovation Act. The startup went on to receive funding from Invest Nebraska and raised $38 million in venture funding while growing the company to more than 200 employees by 2022.
Speaking on a panel at the 2025 Tech Nebraska Summit, CompanyCam CFO Tullen Mabbutt cited the importance of the early stage funding the company received from Nebraska investors as an important catalyst for the company’s growth and success.
Prior to the Series C round, CompanyCam raised a $30 million Series B in 2021, led by Insight Partners.
“Insight Venture Partners is a tier one investor. They manage a $90 billion asset fund that invests in tech,” Mabbutt said. “CompanyCam would not be where we are today without Insight Ventures being a part of our board, investing in us and helping us solve the problem — the hard problems of scaling.”
“Insight Venture would not have been on our board if it wasn’t for all of the other things that happened — the prototype grant, being able to get seed raised in Nebraska … Getting to that next step is what feeds the ultimate thing that everyone wants,” he continued.
Other CompanyCam investors include Nelnet, JMI Equity, Blueprint Equity, WndrCo and Decades Holdings.
“Early innovation funding in Nebraska today means future, scalable companies starting in Nebraska,” said Jason Ball, CEO of the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce. “The Prototype Grant alone returns $13 to every $1 invested by the state of Nebraska. Other programs funded through the Business Innovation Act have led to the infrastructure and ecosystem that makes Nebraska a competitive place for startup companies.”
The fact that the Business Innovation Act funds provide non-dilutive capital, which does not require entrepreneurs to give up any ownership in their company, is critical to help founders develop a proof of concept that they can take to the market to validate their solution, Invest Nebraska’s Hoffman said.
CompanyCam is still “all in on Nebraska” with 161 employees based at the Lincoln headquarters as of September — a 20% increase in headcount since 2023, according to an email to SPN from Haley Gonzales, a spokesperson for CompanyCam.
As an investor in CompanyCam, Hoffman receives updates on the company’s progress and plans. He said CompanyCam intends to hire another 50-60 employees in the next year. The average age of CompanyCam employees is 32 years old, he added. “If we want to address the brain drain in Nebraska, these are the types of companies we need to grow.”
Beyond brain drain, there are real economic benefits to supporting high-growth tech startups in the state.
“I might just add, all the tech companies – whether it’s Buildertrend or Hudl or Flywheel or CompanyCam — all of these companies provide some type of stock incentive plans to their employees,” Hoffman said.
“As a result of that, when these companies grow to the point that CompanyCam has grown, it makes a lot of those employees instantly very wealthy individuals because of working at a company from the very beginning to this point,” he said. “It creates a lot of wealth in Nebraska that otherwise is not being created by traditional companies.”
That wealth contributes to the local economy through growing the tax base, and it puts individuals in a position to invest in future startups as angel investors.
“I’m not afraid to say it, we’ve created liquidity,” CompanyCam CFO Mabbutt said from the Tech Nebraska stage. “There’s been a lot of taxes paid locally, and people that are now in a position to reinvest.”
B Capital is now CompanyCam’s largest external investor. Facebook’s first investor and co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, is co-CEO at B Capital and co-founded the investment firm.
“With its loyal customer base of tradesmen and contractors across the country, CompanyCam has the perfect foundation to introduce more practical, time-saving AI tools to its customers,” B Capital General Partner Timur Akazhanov said in a press release.
Gonzales said CompanyCam CEO Hansen and the leadership team still maintain board and operational control of the startup and that B Capital brings more than funding to the table.
“Their internal AI team and global network are big levers for us,” Gonzales said. “Eduardo Saverin (and) B Capital open doors in tech, AI and international expansion.”
Gonzales said an expansion into the United Kingdom is in the works with potential to explore the broader European market in the future.
CompanyCam saw 300% growth in AI actions within its platform in the last year, Gonzales said. The capital infusion and strategic support from B Capital will allow the company to accelerate development of AI features such as automatically generated reports, predictive workflows and enhanced photo tagging and search capabilities, she added.
The platform currently has hundreds of thousands of users around the world, according to CompanyCam leadership. In a 2022 fireside chat with Startup Grind (now Scale Omaha) in July 2022, Hansen said the startup had north of $20 million in annual recurring revenue and growing.
CompanyCam’s “North Star,” Gonzales said, is to “make AI a teammate, not a gimmick” for contractors using the app.
In the meantime, CompanyCam’s unicorn status is a North Star for the rest of the Nebraska startup community. And the liquidity the company has already created is sure to impact the ecosystem in the years to come.
“CompanyCam is a perfect example of the kind of primary job-generating company that we should all celebrate, creating high-paying jobs and long-term wealth in Nebraska,” Lincoln Chamber CEO Ball said.
Ben Goeser contributed to this story.