Many trade contractors were forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to take a hard look at their supply chains. When StructShare entered the market in 2021, buying, storing and shipping materials like electrical conduit and ductwork was still often relying on email, manual data entry and accounting systems built off of spreadsheets or paper notepads.
The Austin, Texas-based startup has built a cloud platform for specialty contractor supply chains, covering procurement as well as workflow management and communication. Tools in StructShare can create purchase orders, track deliveries, manage warehouse inventory, identify problems such as price increases or lack of availability and track whether received deliveries match orders. All of these tasks in estimating and procurement can be completed from a smartphone or desktop app, and estimators and project executives do not have to change their existing purchasing processes. All purchase orders are generated as dynamic PDFs so paper records can be generated if needed, but all of a specialty contractor’s inventory and purchase history is saved in the cloud, allowing the system to capture many of the nuances of construction procurement.
“I can track deliveries as either fully or partially received,” says Noam Karoly, who was the leader of specialty contractor implementation at Procore before joining StructShare as director of customer success in late 2021. “I ordered a hundred, I got a hundred, but if I’ve only got 50 of the 100 units, I can enter that directly from the job site [on a smartphone]. I can add a message here in the app for the supplier or for my internal purchasing manager.”
StructShare announced Mar. 22 an $8-million funding round with major investments from Kompas and Cemex Ventures, which is a supplier partner.
“From one side, we are an SaaS platform focused on contractors, streamlining their entire processes, but the next step really is integrating suppliers into the platform, providing both the real-time [pricing] data and automation from the supplier side,” says Or Lakritz, co-founder and CEO of StructShare, which has an integration with Procore’s platform. About one-third of its customers use the two platforms together for project and supply chain management. StructShare also has connections into enterprise resource planning systems such as Sage 300.
Karoly and Lakritz both say the pandemic made specialty contractors reconsider their procurement processes. Lakritz says that after more integrations with suppliers, the next step is using StructShare to predict customers’ future needs.
