When you think about the platforms in the construction industry, there are concrete slabs designed to first think of steel beams and tall columns. Munich-based startup Comstruct wants to design different types of platforms, or software platforms, for the construction industry.
At the heart of this, Comstruct is a construction material procurement platform. For large projects, material orders can take a lot of time as material providers continue to print delivery notes and invoices. Orders are often called, making it difficult to coordinate your invoices and create a comprehensive data report.
The startup has also announced a $12.5 million Series A round led by GV and 20VC, with existing investors BOOOM and Puzzle Ventures reinvesting.
“Today, the sourcing process for materials under construction is very similar. You can make a call to order 10 cubic meters next Thursday. Then you can get a physical delivery note on the site. , and then it will be entered into the Excel sheet,” Comstruct co-founder and CEO Henric Meinhardt told TechCrunch. “And sometimes they mail it to headquarters and send it there manually compares the invoice to the receipt.”
Each material supplier can build their own apps to process orders, but the problem is that the contractor doesn't want to deal with 100 different apps to get the documents. There, Comstruct is a platform that can integrate these processes.
Comstruct will generally work with countless suppliers depending on the location of the construction site and other specific needs, so they will contact the general contractor first to understand how the general will get the materials. Masu.
“We approach these material suppliers. We call them and ask: How can we share data? Is there an EDI interface? Is there an email that lets us forward the information? Materials Is there a customer portal you can do while rubbing to find it? And then structure the information,” Meinhardt said.
Startups use machine learning to integrate each supplier into the platform. “This technical improvement has allowed us to integrate 800 material suppliers over the past two years, which is already a significant amount,” Meinhardt said.
In addition to this data layer, Comstruct has built four modules on orders, digital delivery receipts, invoice adjustments, and ESG reports. Startups run on a usage-based pricing model with a simple, per-document pricing strategy.
“” [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] In Europe [contractors] You will need to report how much material you have included in the construction project. Until now, they didn't know how much they used it […] That's a number they didn't have,” Mainhardt said.
Comstruct competes in the US with Kojo and UK QFLOW, but each competitor has its own positioning. According to Meinhardt, Kojo “has a greater focus on the procurement side,” while Qflow “has a greater focus on waste management.”
The company originally started working in Switzerland. Because Meinhardt studied there. Comstruct claims that it already covers the country's materials industry appropriately, with 70% to 80% of the requested suppliers on the platform already there. The company is currently expanding to Germany, Austria and other European countries in response to construction projects.
Some large construction sites already use Comstruct to manage construction materials, including several tunnel projects, the Stockholm highway project, and the large train project in Munich. For example, the Gotthard Tunnel Project in Switzerland (pictured below) relies on Comstruct to process all delivery notes and link to invoices.
Image credit: Comstruct
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