According to GlobalFair CEO Shaily Garg, the construction materials market is fragmented because it involves layers of supply chain and logistics complexities.
In a survey conducted for the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo in 2021, the vast majority of builders stated that the time it takes to obtain materials — as well as the cost of materials — remain the top issues they face.
Garg believes that technology can help, which is why she and Ashish Chandra founded GlobalFair in 2020. With a digital marketplace for U.S.
Construction contractors, GlobalFair, a business-to-business startup, aims to simplify the procurement of “ready-to-install” materials such as countertops, quartz countertops, cabinets, natural stones, and tiles.
GlobalFair today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed — a mix of equity ($12 million) and debt ($8 million) — with participation from Saama Capital, India Quotient, AUM Ventures and Stride Ventures.
It brings the company’s total raised to $22 million following a $2 million seed round last February.
“The idea of GlobalFair was something Chandra and I felt strongly about, given the fragmented nature of construction businesses,” Garg said. “Across the world, global supply chain challenges are resulting in construction delays and labor shortages.”
Garg says she became interested in construction at a young age. Her family owned a quartz manufacturing company, and she was trained as an engineer, eventually working for P&G before founding GlobalFair after stints at PwC and TransUnion.
Chandra is also an engineer with a background in infrastructure consulting, having worked as a director at PwC India and co-founded TrueCover, a startup that creates blockchain-based insurance tools.
Garg and Chandra used their technical backgrounds to create GlobalFair, a platform with predictive modeling capabilities.
While GlobalFair’s flagship product is a marketplace that connects contractors, distributors, fabricators, architects, and construction companies to procure materials, the platform also provides a tool to automate construction material cost estimates from architectural plans and site shop drawings.
Aside from that, the company offers a material visualization app to help architects and designers anticipate how things will look once installed, as well as an automated enterprise resource planning system to “enable swift response time for customers and suppliers across multiple geographies,” according to Garg’s work.
MORE FROM RAVZGADGET: US To Launch ‘Labeling’ Rating Program For Internet-Connected Devices In 2023
“We have created an end-to-end synchronized supply chain from discovery to the final delivery of materials at a customer’s doorstep,” Garg said.
“Our one-stop-shop platform is transformational for supply-side manufacturing, opening up the pockets of manufacturing that exist in India, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries for the global markets.
We aim to become the largest technology-first global supplier of building materials, providing an easy, cost-efficient and seamless cross-border procurement experience for construction contractors.”
To that end, GlobalFair claims to be working with “hundreds” of contractors and retail customers across the United States, specifically for multifamily and hospitality projects ranging in size from $100 million to $500 million.
According to Garg, GlobalFair’s clientele ranges from large manufacturers and local distributors to exporters and retail chains purchasing from distributors.
Garg credits the company’s recent success to the pandemic and the resulting supply chain chaos. According to a Buildertrend report, the average number of days of delays more than doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year, owing to volatile material costs, shipping backlogs, and scarce labor.
“COVID-19 has had a seismic impact on global production networks, such that logistics costs and existing supply chains have altered fundamentally,” Garg said.
“Businesses today are more worried about the resilience of their supply chains and are therefore looking to expand their supplier networks … At GlobalFair, we are disintermediating the long cross-border supply chain, connecting contractors directly to the suppliers.”
MORE FROM RAVZGADGET: Eswatini’s Central Bank Mulls Issuance Of A Digital Currency