In 2018, Maria Rioumine and Ryan Gibson worked at venture capital firm 8VC and lived on the same street in San Francisco. Often when they walked around the city they would ask themselves how was it possible that in a place that had so much innovation and where there was a chronic dearth of affordable housing, building anything took so long and was so slow.
As they dove into what it would take to build faster, cheaper and better, they realized that the cost to build any project largely broke down to 60% in labor cost and 40% in material cost.
Rioumine and Gibson looked at how the material supply chain worked and saw it was still being run on pen and paper and it still involved either software that was built decades ago or old processes that had not been changed at all.
So, the two cofounded Agora, a construction technology company which streamlines the material supply for commercial trade contractors. Today, the company announced that it has raised $7 million in a Series A funding led by 8VC, with participation from Tishman Speyer, Suffolk Construction, Kevin Hartz, Abstract Ventures, and BoxGroup.
"We streamline the supply chain for commercial construction companies,” Rioumine, who serves as the company’s CEO, says. “We make it easy for commercial construction companies find the right materials, order them, track them, and check them in."
The company has two main user groups: the foremen in the field who use the Agora app like a shopping cart to find the materials, compile their orders which then automatically get sent to the office teams who use the company’s desktop suite to manage the vendor pricing, getting those orders sent in and getting them processed.
"Right now it can take up to 30 minutes for foremen to put together a single requisition and there's a lot of detail they need to give their purchasing agents to make sure they're finding the right things," Rioumine says. "We turn that 30 minutes into under one minute."
Agora's app
Agora
Agora is currently processing about $1 million a week in purchase order volume and the company has grown the number of users on the platform by 20x, and the revenue by 3x since March. It is currently focusing on the electrical vertical, where it counts clients like Taft Electric, William Bradley Electric, and RC Power, though Rioumine says that in the future they plan on expanding into other trades.
Rioumine, who’s Russian born in Moscow, and first moved to Israel and then to UK where she graduated from Oxford (she was president of the esteemed Oxford Student Union), worked at Goldman Sachs before joining 8VC. Gibson, a fellow immigrant is native Canadian, previously worked as an engineer at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft’s HoloLens. The two of them met at 8VC and this year made it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list.
Alex Kolicich, founding partner at 8VC who led the round and had previously worked with Rioumine and Gibson while they were at 8VC, says that construction hasn’t had a lot of innovation in terms of productivity gains over time, and that procurement is an interesting space as it can affect companies’ bottom line.
“If you look at these construction companies they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the material supply chain,” Kolicich says. “If you can go in and make that purchasing decision more efficient then you can really add incredible amounts of value.”.
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