Source: Techcrunch

Comstruct is announcing a €12.5 million round ($13 million at current exchange rates) led by GV and 20VC with existing investors Booom and Puzzle Ventures investing once again.

“Today, the procurement process of materials in construction is very analog. You could place a phone call to order 10 cubic meters next Thursday. Then you get a physical delivery note on the site that is then typed out into an Excel sheet,” Comstruct co-founder and CEO, Henric Meinhardt, told TechCrunch. “And then they’d sometimes send it via post to the headquarters, where they then manually compare invoices to the receipts.”

“We approach those material 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 forward the information? Do you have a customer portal that we can scrape to find materials? And then we structure the information,” Meinhardt said. The startup then uses machine learning to integrate each supplier on its platform. “This technical improvement enabled us to integrate 800 material suppliers over the last two years, which is quite a significant amount already,” Meinhardt said.

Some large-scale construction sites have used Comstruct already to manage construction materials, including several tunnel projects, a highway project in Stockholm and a big train project in Munich.