Try to imagine the variety of parts needed to produce a rocket engine. Now imagine that you simply request and compare quotes for each of those parts, get approval to purchase the part you ultimately select, and track these parts until they arrive at your headquarters. It’s exactly as complicated because it sounds – but it doesn’t have to be, at least that is what two brothers say who just secured funding to update the procurement process for hardware corporations.
Like many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in an otherwise cutting-edge industry. CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space corporations L3Harris, Blue Origin and Stoke Space. And each time he faced the same annoying problem: getting the parts he needed.
“As my career progressed, I became more and more frustrated,” he said in a recent interview. “It really came down to me feeling that what was holding the hardware back was the software that everyone was using. It made everyone much less efficient.”
He teamed up with his brother, former Meta software engineer Haris Sahmanovic, to found Forge in May 2023. The pair joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort, with that $2.1 million seed round led by the company’s Gradient Ventures Google includes participation from YC and other business angels.
Emir characterised today’s equipment purchasing process as confusing, overcomplicated and wasteful. At larger corporations, engineers are typically kept out of the process — the order request goes into a “black box,” he said — but they’re also typically unaware of other team members’ orders.
This quickly leads to problems: Imagine that Engineer A needs to order a part and it needs to arrive on time according to Engineer B’s schedule, so he pays $20,000 in expedited delivery. However, it seems that Engineer B’s part will likely be late. If they knew this, they might get monetary savings and headaches.
Delays might also have other causes. Engineers who don’t have a clear picture of their team’s purchasing history or vendor capabilities can lead to a lack of expertise of what needs are being ordered, when, and from whom.
“It’s a waste of the engineer’s time, it’s a waste of the supply chain team’s time and it’s a waste of the company’s money,” Emir said.
Many existing procurement tools only function a place to store data, but that is not where any of the work happens: it happens in email chains, spreadsheets and PDF files. It’s not standardized. The Forge system uses an artificial intelligence model to analyze supplier responses – whether the quote is in a spreadsheet, email or PDF – and integrates this information into its platform.
For this reason, vendor adoption is not needed for corporations to make Forge work, which is a hurdle that hampers other standardization efforts. It’s a “huge, core piece of value,” Emir said. “You can never get [suppliers] adopt this solution because they have 20 different clients. They won’t learn 20 different tools for all 20 clients.”
Engineers may create custom workflows based on the needs of the company, which is crucial, especially for larger and smaller corporations. Forge software does greater than just track orders. Forge software also includes receipt request management, purchasing workflows, bid comparison, and automated supplier onboarding and performance tracking.
Forge already has paying customers, and the two brothers plan to use the seed funding to attract more as they improve the product and expand their (two-person) team.