Try to imagine the number of parts needed to build a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of these parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you ultimately choose, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your headquarters. It’s just as complicated as it sounds – but it doesn’t have to be, or so say two brothers who just won funding to update the procurement process for hardware companies.
Like so many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in an otherwise pioneering industry. CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin and Stoke Space. And in each, he faced the same infuriating problem: actually getting the parts he needed.
“I just kept getting more and more frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview. “It really got to the point where I felt like what was holding the hardware back were the software tools that everyone was using. It made everyone more ineffective.”
He partnered with his brother, former Meta software engineer Haris Sakhmanovitch, to found Forge in May 2023. The pair joined Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort, and this $2.1 million round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures includes participation from YC and other angel investors.
Emir described the current hardware procurement process as confusing, overly complicated and wasteful. In larger companies, engineers are typically kept out of the process — the supply request goes into a “black box,” he said — but they also generally ignore other team members’ supply orders.
This quickly leads to problems: imagine Engineer A needs to order a part and needs it to arrive on time to match Engineer B’s schedule, so they pay $20,000 in acceleration feeds. But it turns out Engineer B’s part will be late. Had they known, they could have saved themselves the money and headache.
Delays may also occur for other reasons. Engineers not having a clear view of their team’s purchasing history or their suppliers’ capabilities can lead to a lack of understanding of what needs were ordered, when, and by whom.
“It’s a waste of an 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 are simply used as a place to store data, but none of the work is done: it takes place in email chains, spreadsheets and PDFs. It is not standardized. Forge’s system uses an artificial intelligence model to analyze the supplier’s response—whether that quote comes in a spreadsheet, text email, or PDF—and integrate that information into its platform.
Because of this, vendor adoption isn’t necessary for companies to make Forge work, a hurdle that has hindered other standardization efforts. That’s a “huge core value prop,” Emir said. “You can never take [suppliers] to adopt it because they have 20 different customers. They’re not going to learn 20 different tools for all 20 clients.”
Engineers can also make custom workflows based on company needs, which is critical, especially for larger versus smaller businesses. More than just order tracking, Forge’s software also includes recruitment request management, purchasing workflows, quote 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 by improving the product and growing their (two-person) team.
