When you think about platforms in the construction industry, you may be thinking about specific platforms designed to support steel beams and tall columns. Munich-based startup Comstruct We want to design another platform to digitize the construction industry, a software platform.
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.
At the heart of this, Comstruct is a construction material procurement platform. For large projects, material orders can take time to process as materials companies continue to print delivery notes and invoices. In many cases, orders can be generated over the phone, and it can be difficult to coordinate your invoices and create a comprehensive data report.
“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 their orders. But the problem is that contractors don’t want to deal with 100 different apps to get documentation. This is where Comstruct comes in to build a platform to integrate these processes.
Comstruct first contacted the general contractor to understand how to get the materials. They generally work with countless suppliers depending on the location of the construction site and other specific needs.
“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.
The company originally started working in Switzerland. Because Meinhardt studied there. Comstruct claims that it already adequately compensates the Swiss materials industry, as it already has between 70 and 80% of the requested suppliers on its platform. Currently, it is expanding to Germany, Austria and other European countries, depending on the construction project.
Comstruct has built four modules on top of this data layer, focusing on orders, digital delivery receipts, invoice adjustments and ESG reports. The startup chose usage-based pricing with a simple, per-document pricing strategy.
” [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] In Europe, it is necessary to report how much material has been included in a construction project. And up until now, they didn’t know how much they used… that’s a number they didn’t have,” Mainhart said.
Comstruct conflicts Koho US or Qflow In the UK, 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.”
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.
