When you think about platforms in the construction industry, there are possibilities that concrete slabs designed to support steel bundles and high pillars might be to mind. Startup from Munich Comstruct He wants to design a different sort of platform for the construction industry – a software platform.
At the heart of Comstruct is an order platform for building materials. In the case of huge -scale projects, materials can take a lot of time because materials suppliers are still printing notes and delivery invoices. Orders are often submitted by phone and it might be difficult to reconcile with invoices and create comprehensive data reports.
The startup declares a round of EUR 12.5 million (USD 13 million at current exchange rates) run by GV and 20VC with existing Booom and Puzzle Ventures Investing again.
“Currently, the ordering process of material in construction is very analog. You can put the phone to order 10 cubic meters next Thursday. Then you get a physical delivery note on the page, which is then entered on the Excel sheet, “said Techcrunch, co -founder and general director of Comstruct, Henric Meinhardt. “And then sometimes they sent him to the headquarters by post, where they then manually compare invoices with influences.”
Each material supplier can build their very own application to process orders, but the problem is that contractors do not want to deal with 100 different applications to get documents. This is where Comstruct has its own platform that may unite these processes.
Comstruct First contacts with general contractors to understand how they receive their materials, because they often cooperate with countless suppliers depending on the location of construction sites and other specific needs.
“We are approaching these material suppliers. We call them and ask: how are you going to share data? Do you have an EDI interface? Do you have an e -mail message in which you’ll provide information? Do you have a customer portal that we will scrape to find materials? And then we structure the information – said Meinhardt.
The startup then uses machine learning to integrate each supplier on its platform. “This technical improvement has allowed us to integrate 800 suppliers of materials in the last two years, which is quite a significant amount,” said Meinhardt.
In addition to this layer of knowledge, Comstruct has built 4 modules around ordering, digital delivery, invoice reconstruction and ESG reporting. The startup takes place in a price model based on use with a easy document valuation strategy.
“WITH [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] in Europe, [contractors] You need to report how much material has entered construction projects. So far they didn’t know how much concrete they used […] This is a number they didn’t have – said Meinhardt.
Comstruct competes with Kojo in the USA and Qflow In Great Britain, but each competitor has its own position. According to Meinhardt, Kojo (*13*), while Qflow “focuses on waste management.”
The company originally began working in Switzerland because he studied Meinhardt there. Comstruct claims that it already has a good range of the material industry in this country and already has 70% to 80% of the suppliers asked on its platform. The company is currently developing to Germany, Austria and other European countries depending on construction projects.
Some on a large construction scale have already used Comstruct to manage building materials, including several tunnel projects, a motorway design in Stockholm and a Big Train project in Munich. For example, the Tunnel Gotthard project in Switzerland (pictured below) is based on Comstruct to handle all delivery notes and mix them with invoices.