UptractorRequest a pilotAbout us · Launch Collective
Uptractor is a Launch Collective project, built at the AiEdge Buildathon 2026 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We are building it first for owner-operated general contractors in the Black Hills.
The team
Two people.
One job record.
Jordan Mason
Operations and systems builder · Rapid City, SD
Jordan has spent about 20 years in campaign, public affairs, client-service and vendor operations, work where deadlines are fixed and mistakes are public. He has run production for direct mail, video, digital advertising and voter-data projects, coordinated vendors and bids, and served as a city council member.
Through Launch Collective he builds practical AI and workflow systems for small organizations, using tools like n8n, Google Workspace and CRM platforms, always with a person in the loop. At Uptractor he leads product direction, customer conversations and pilots.
Ben Hodgens
Technical lead · Rapid City, SD
Ben is a systems architect with more than 20 years in infrastructure, storage and cloud operations. He has worked at VAST Data, Amazon Web Services (as a senior solutions architect for Amazon FSx for OpenZFS), Cloudian, Joyent and Nexenta, where he diagnosed hard performance and reliability problems and built the tools and processes that made support and field teams faster. He holds the AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) certification.
At Uptractor he leads the technical design and build: the Jobfile database, the agent and its fixed set of tools, and the voice pipeline that turns a phone call into a record.
His architecture choices are why the trust rules on this site can be enforced in code. Each contractor gets one Jobfile, spoken numbers come from the database, email stays a draft, and the speech and language models can run on a single local machine.
Away from the keyboard, he owns Black Hills Knives, a bladesmithing shop in Rapid City.
How we work
Plain terms.
- 1
Prototype, said plainly
Uptractor is being built, and no customer results exist yet. We would rather say that than guess.
- 2
Built for the driveway
The person we have in mind is the owner who is also the office, running subs and suppliers from the truck.
- 3
People stay in charge
Email is drafts, texts go to your own list, and anything unclear is flagged for a person before it is relied on.
Pilot conversations
Talk to us.
If you run subs and suppliers by phone, text and email, we would like to hear how your jobs really work.