When you think about platforms in the construction industry, the chances are the concrete slabs designed to support steel beams and the tall pillars will come to your mind first. Munich -based boot Influence He wants to design a different kind of platform for the construction industry – a software platform.
At its core, Comstruct is a supply platform for building materials. For large -scale projects, material processing orders can take a lot of time, as material providers continue to print delivery notes and invoices. Orders are often placed by phone and it can be difficult to reconcile invoices and create comprehensive data reports.
And the start announces a round of 12.5m euros ($ 13 million in current exchange rates) led by GV and 20VC, with existing investors investing once again by businesses that invest once again.
“Today, the process of supply materials in the construction is very analog. You could make a phone call to order 10 cubic meters next Thursday. Then you receive a physical delivery note on the site that is then typed in an Excel sheet,” he said Co -founder and CEO of Comstruct Henric Meinhardt in TechCrunch. “And then they sometimes sent it through the post on the seat, where they then compare the invoices to the receipts.”
Each material supplier could create its own application to process orders, but the problem is that contractors do not want to deal with 100 different applications to receive documents. There comes Comstruct with its platform that can integrate these processes.
Comstruct first comes into contact with general contractors to understand how they get their materials, as they generally work with myriad suppliers depending on the location of the construction sites and other specific needs.
“We are approaching these materials suppliers. We call them and ask them: How can you share the data? Do you have an EDI interface? Do you have an email where you can promote information? Do you have a client gate that we can scrape to find materials? And in We are constantly shaping the information, “Meinhardt said.
The boot then uses mechanical learning to integrate each supplier on its platform. “This technical improvement has allowed us to incorporate 800 suppliers of materials over the last two years, which is already a very significant amount,” Meinhardt said.
In addition to this data layer, Comstruct has built four sections around the order, digital delivery receipts, invoice reconciliation and ESG report. Starting is run on a pricing model based on a simple disk pricing strategy.
‘With the [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] In Europe, [contractors] You have to report how many materials went to construction projects. Until now, they didn’t know how specific they used […] This is a number they didn’t, “Meinhardt said.
Comstruct competes Katzi in the US and Qflow In the United Kingdom, but every competitor has its own position. According to Meinhardt, Kojo “focuses much more on the side of the procurement”, while QFlow “focuses very much on waste management”.
The company initially started working in Switzerland because Meinhardt studied there. COMSTRUCT claims that it already has good coverage of the materials industry in that country and already has 70% to 80% of the requested suppliers on its platform. The company is currently expanding to Germany, Austria and other European countries depending on construction projects.
Some large -scale construction sites have already used Comstruct to manage building materials, including several tunnel projects, a motorway project in Stockholm and a large train project in Munich. For example, the Gotthard Tunnel project in Switzerland (shown below) is based on Comstruct to handle all delivery notes and connect them to invoices.
