The most credible data in any industry does not come from a national index published two quarters late. It comes from the field this week — what materials actually cost, what crews actually charged, what a delay actually did to a schedule. Vertical Marketplace was built around that observation, and it started with the industry where the gap between the published number and the real number is widest: construction.

The data was always there — it just had nowhere to go

Every contractor is sitting on a pile of ground-truth data that AI models are starving for: regional cost indexes, subcontractor rates, real timelines. Models trained on textbooks and press releases get construction wrong constantly, because the real numbers never make it into the training set. They live in spreadsheets on a hundred thousand laptops, with no way to sell them short of becoming a data company.

Why a marketplace, and why agents

The unlock is letting an agent do the selling. A data owner should not have to run a storefront, negotiate contracts, or manage buyers. Their data should list itself, price itself per query, and pay them when someone uses it. That is what the marketplace does: a seller's agent lists the data, a buyer's agent purchases it, and the seller keeps 95% of every sale, settled automatically.

• Real field data, not textbook estimates.
• Listed by an agent, sold to an agent, no forms in between.
• Priced per query, so a buyer pays for exactly the answer it needs.
• 95% to the seller — the party who actually did the work.

Nexen: real data from the field

The construction listings on the marketplace come from Nexen — real data from the field, not from a textbook. That is the whole thesis in one line. The most credible data in any vertical comes from the people doing the work, and until now they had no way to sell it to the machines that need it most.

The best construction data does not come from a research firm. It comes from the yard on a Tuesday.

Vertical Marketplace is the thing that should have existed when contractors were bidding jobs blind: a place where the party with the real numbers gets paid, and the agent that needs them gets the truth. Construction was just the first vertical — every industry has its own version of the yard on a Tuesday.