40U40-26_56PAGE_PT - Flipbook - Page 52
40 UNDER 40 2026
ALUMNI OF THE YEAR
MALLORIE BRODIE
Alumni of the Year
FOR MALLORIE BRODIE, her story started at 6 years old.
Her father was involved in commercial real estate consulting and let her tag along on a business trip, never once
underestimating her or her contributions. Her roots in construction go even deeper. Her great-grandfather had a steel
mill and her grandfather founded the family’s demolition
company.
That early industry exposure led to something much
bigger.
In 2012 Brodie and her business partner saw a missing
piece in the construction industry ecosystem and jumped on
it, launching tech company Bridgit.
It’s easy to forget that 40 Under 40 is about
recognizing young talent. This award looks at what
happened to alumni in the years following their win.
Did they keep innovating, growing and building?
Each year we will highlight an alumnus who has
continued to have an impact on the sector.
For decades, the tools used to manage the industry’s most
valuable asset, people, treated them as cells on a spreadsheet.
They saw workforce planning as a chaotic, disconnected
process.
As CEO, she helped launch their 昀氀agship product Bridgit
Bench in 2019, which has been adopted by some of North
America’s largest, most sophisticated construction companies.
This achievement caught the eyes of judges way back in
2020 and she was named a winner of that year’s 40 Under 40
program. But the story doesn’t stop there.
Their approach caught the eye of others too. Bridgit has
raised over $35 million USD in 昀椀nancing from Autodesk,
BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund, Camber
Creek, Export Development Canada, IAF, Nine Four Ventures,
Salesforce Ventures, Sands Capital, StandUp Ventures, Storm
Ventures, and Vanedge Capital.
The list of accolades for Brodie has continued to grow, landing her a spot on Forbes Manufacturing & Industry 30 Under 30,
and Best Of Canada Forbes Under 30 Innovators lists.
52
40 UNDER 40 2026
Just this year, Bridgit took things one step further. After
crunching data from 233 companies and 114,000 people
across the globe, they released a groundbreaking report with
brand new insights into workforce challenges. One of the
biggest 昀椀ndings was that attrition isn’t random and there are
speci昀椀c strategies that address it better than others.
“We were doing a ton of research with the industry with
executives at large contractors in Canada and the U.S. and
we would anecdotally hear all of these stories but there was
no data set that existed,” said Brodie in an interview with
SiteNews.
The company has also refused to stagnate as technology
improves. They have transformed their core platform into an
AI-昀椀rst workforce hub, starting with the launch of Bridgit AI
to eliminate data silos and deliver automated sta昀케ng recommendations. The capabilities expanded into natural-language
queries via Ask Bridgit and eventually added fully agentic
features like Bridgit Agents and a Model Context Protocol
(Bridgit MCP). This allows the platform to autonomously
assemble project teams, resolve schedule con昀氀icts, and push
live workforce data directly into external assistants like
ChatGPT and Claude.
The company’s evolution is teaching the next generation.
Bridgit’s pivot to workforce planning is now a Harvard Business School case study that shows students how to make hard
decisions and not be afraid to change.
SITE REPORTS
DRAGON’S DEN host Kevin O’Leary once told a 20-year-old Mallorie
that he hated the idea of Start Gallery, her first business.
She met her Bridgit co-founder, Lauren Lake, after winning a place
on The Next 36, an elite nationwide program for promising student
entrepreneurs.
To validate their ideas for Bridgit, Mallorie and Lauren conducted over
500 interviews on job sites.
