Imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Then imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting purchase approval for the final selected part, and tracking those parts until they arrive at headquarters. It's exactly as complicated as it sounds. But it doesn't have to be, say two brothers who just secured funding to update their hardware company's procurement process.
Like many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in cutting-edge industries — CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin, and Stoke Space — and all faced the same frustrating problem of actually getting the parts they needed.
“I got more and more frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview, “and I eventually came to the realization that what was holding back advances in hardware were the software tools that everybody was using. It was making everybody so inefficient.”
He teamed up with his brother, Haris Samanovich, a former Meta software engineer, to found Forge in May 2023. The two were in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 cohort, and this $2.1 million seed round, led by Google's Gradient Ventures, also includes participation from YC and other angel investors.
Emil noted that today's hardware procurement process is confusing, overly complicated and wasteful. In large companies, engineers are typically left out of the process and procurement requests are kept in a “black box,” he said. Engineers also typically don't know about other team members' procurement orders.
This quickly leads to a problem: Let's say Engineer A needs to order a part and pays $20,000 in rush shipping because he needs the part to arrive on time to meet Engineer B's schedule. But it turns out Engineer B's part will be delayed. If only the engineer had known, he could have saved himself money and hassle.
Delays can occur for other reasons too: if engineers don't have a clear view of their team's purchasing history or supplier capabilities, they might not know what needs to be ordered, when, and from whom.
“It's a waste of our engineers' time, a waste of our supply chain team's time and a waste of the company's money,” Emile said.
Many existing procurement tools are simply used as a place to store data, but not where work gets done. Work happens in email chains, spreadsheets and PDFs and isn't standardized. Forge's system uses AI models to analyze supplier responses (whether quotes are provided in a spreadsheet, text email or PDF format) and integrates that information into the platform.
So companies don't need to adopt suppliers to make Forge work, a hurdle that has thwarted other standardization efforts. That's a “huge core value proposition,” Emil said. [suppliers] “You're introducing it because you have 20 customers. You're not going to learn 20 different tools for all 20 customers.”
Engineers can also create custom workflows based on a company's needs, which is especially important for large and small businesses. Forge's software includes not only order tracking, but also order request management, purchasing workflows, quote comparison, and automated supplier onboarding and performance tracking.
Forge already has some paying customers, and the brothers plan to use the seed funding to improve the product and expand their team (of two) to attract even more customers.