When you think about platforms in the construction industry, chances are you’re thinking about concrete platforms designed to support steel beams and tall pillars. Munich-based startup Comstruct wants to design a different platform to digitize the construction industry — a software platform.
And the startup is announcing a $12.5 million Series A round led by GV and 20VC with existing investors Booom and Puzzle Ventures investing once again.
At its core, Comstruct is a procurement platform for construction materials. For large-scale projects, processing materials orders can be time-consuming, as materials companies still print out delivery notes and invoices. Orders often happen over the phone, and it can be difficult to reconcile invoices and create comprehensive data reports.
“Today, the procurement process of materials in construction is very analog. You could place a phone call to order 10 cubic meters next Thursday. Then you get a physical delivery note on the site that is then typed out into an Excel sheet,” Comstruct co-founder and CEO Henric Meinhardt told TechCrunch. “And then they’d sometimes send it via post to the headquarters, where they then manually compare invoices to the receipts.”
Each materials supplier could build its own app to process orders. But the problem is that contractors don’t want to deal with 100 different apps to interact with them and get documents. That’s where Comstruct comes along to build a platform that unifies these processes.
Comstruct first contacted general contractors to understand how they get their materials. They generally work with a myriad of suppliers depending on the location of the construction sites and other specific needs.
“We approach those material suppliers. We call them and ask them: how can you share the data? Do you have an EDI interface? Do you have an email where you can forward the information? Do you have a customer portal that we can scrape to find materials? And then we structure the information,” Meinhardt said.
The startup then uses machine learning to integrate each supplier on its platform. “This technical improvement enabled us to integrate 800 material suppliers over the last two years, which is quite a significant amount already,” Meinhardt said.
The company originally started working in Switzerland because Meinhardt studied there. And Comstruct claims that it already has good coverage of the materials industry in Switzerland, as it as 70 to 80% of requested suppliers on the platform already. It is currently expanding to Germany, Austria and other European countries depending on the construction projects.
Comstruct has built four modules on top of this data layer around ordering, digital delivery receipts, invoice reconciliation and ESG reporting. The startup has chosen usage-based pricing with a simple per-document pricing strategy.
“With the [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] in Europe, they need to report how much material went into construction projects. And until now, they didn’t know how much concrete they used … that’s a number they didn’t have,” Meinhardt said.
Comstruct competes with Kojo in the U.S. or Qflow in the U.K. But each competitor has its unique positioning. According to Meinhardt, Kojo “focuses a lot more on the procurement side” while Qflow “focuses a lot on waste management.”
Some large-scale construction sites have used Comstruct already to manage construction materials, including several tunnel projects, a highway project in Stockholm and a big train project in Munich. For instance, the Gotthard Tunnel project in Switzerland (pictured below) relies on Comstruct to handle all delivery notes and link them to invoices.
#Comstruct #platform #digitize #construction #industry #raises #million