When you consider platforms in the construction industry, you may consider concrete platforms designed to support steel beams and high columns. Munich-based startup ComStruct wants to design a different platform to digitalize the construction industry - a software platform.

The startup announced a $12.5 million Series A-Series led by GV and 20VC, with existing investors Booom and Puzzle Ventures reinvested.

Comstruct is at its core the procurement platform for building materials. For large projects, processing material orders can be time consuming because the material company still prints out delivery notes and invoices. Orders usually occur over the phone and it is difficult to reconcile invoices and create comprehensive data reports.

“The procurement process for materials in construction these days is very similar. You can order a 10 cubic metre phone call next Thursday. You will then get physical delivery instructions on the website and enter it into the Excel form.” “Then, they sometimes do Send it to the headquarters by mail, and then manually compare the invoice to the receipt there.”

Each material supplier can build its own application to handle orders. But the problem is that the contractor doesn't want to deal with 100 different applications interacting with them and getting the files. This is where ComStruct builds a platform that unifies these processes.

COMSTRUCT first contacted the general contractor to find out how they got the materials. They usually work with countless suppliers based on the location of the construction site and where other specific needs are.

"We contact these substance suppliers. We call them and ask them: How do you share data? Do you have an EDI interface? Do you have an email to forward information? Do you have a customer portal that can scratch to find materials? Then we build the information,” Meinhardt said.

The startup then uses machine learning to integrate each vendor into its platform. "This technological improvement has enabled us to integrate 800 material suppliers over the past two years, which is already a considerable number," Meinhardt said.

The company initially started working in Switzerland as Meinhardt studied there. Comstruct claims it already has good coverage for Switzerland’s materials industry, as it already has 70% to 80% of suppliers on the platform. Currently, it is expanding to Germany, Austria and other European countries, depending on the construction project.

COMSTRUCT builds four modules based on this data layer, focusing on ordering, digital delivery receipts, invoice settlements and ESG reporting. The startup chose usage-based pricing with a simple per-piece pricing strategy.

“With the help of Europe (Company Sustainability Reporting Directive), they need to report materials for construction projects. Until now, they don’t know how much concrete they used…that’s a number they don’t have,” Meinhardt said.

COMSTRUCT competes with Kojo in the United States or QFlow in the United Kingdom, but each competitor has its own unique positioning. According to Meinhardt, Kojo "focused more on procurement aspects" while QFlow "focused on waste management."

Some large-scale construction sites have used Comstruct to manage building materials, including several tunnel projects, highway projects in Stockholm and large train projects in Munich. For example, the Gotthard Tunnel project in Switzerland (pictured below) relies on COMSTRUCT to process all delivery notes and link them to invoices.