We’re excited to announce our newest investment in Kojo’s $39M Series C led by Battery Ventures. Nine Four Ventures is thrilled and fortunate for the opportunity to deepen its partnership with Maria and the Kojo team, and continue supporting them on their mission to build a market-leading materials management platform for the construction industry. Here is a bit more about the business, opportunity, and why we re-invested.
Kojo is a materials management platform purpose-built for the construction industry. It allows contractors across the trades to submit, approve, track, and reconcile orders at scale with a cloud-native, integrated platform. Kojo’s approach is changing the construction materials process from being historically reactive to proactive. Maria, Micah, and the team realized the construction industry is evolving: recent, dramatic supply chain challenges have led to higher prices, lower inventory, and longer turnaround times, for example. As a result, contractors are running into unprecedented, acute scale limitations and often being forced to rely on multiple suppliers requiring them to “split” orders across distributors, adding logistical complexity to an already opaque workflow. Prior to Kojo, there were few alternatives for contractors, who were forced to stitch together custom workflows usually comprised of Excel spreadsheets, emails, and call notes, and left them vulnerable to increased “shadow costs” such as human errors, wasted time, etc. The previous paradigm wasn’t set up to handle modern-day supply chain complexities but, fortunately, Kojo is. Customers now have a new platform to help manage their supply chains more efficiently.
Platforms like Kojo allow contractors across the entire construction development lifecycle to meaningfully improve scalability. While Kojo found initial success and proved product market fit with electrical contractors, it successfully expanded into trades such as mechanical, concrete, drywall, tiling, and roofing. The advantages of Kojo’s product are beginning to be discovered in the enterprise segment, an exciting expansion beyond its initial SMB core focus. These verticals and segments are massive.
Kojo’s opportunity extends well beyond software and into FinTech and InsurTech. Kojo and its customers are well positioned to benefit from embedding multiple payment, financing, and insurance products into the workflow by leveraging its robust SaaS-layer foundation. These additional products and services can further improve cash flow management and reduce risks for customers while increasing wallet share and strengthening already strong retention.
Maria and the team’s progress over the past twelve months since the Series B is extremely impressive. They’re executing on an aggressive plan, launching new products and partnerships, and discovering new use cases in nascent verticals and segments. Although Kojo has accomplished a lot in a short period of time, there’s still so much left to do. We’re in for an exciting next few years as the company’s rapid pace of innovation continues. If you’re a contractor interested in learning more, please reach out. And if you’re interested in making the built environment faster, easier, and more sustainable to build, Kojo is hiring!
Congrats again Maria and the Kojo team on this incredible milestone!
