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Three founders. Three companies. Three different entry points into the construction supply chain.

None of them have worked together. But all three have arrived at the same conclusion: material procurement is becoming its own software category.

We recently sat down with Maria Davidson, Executive Chairman of Kojo; Eldar Sadikov, Co-founder and CEO of Field Materials AI; and Forest Flager, Founder of Parspec. Together, their companies touch a $600 billion annual materials spend across US construction. That's roughly 30 to 40% of every project's total cost. And the overwhelming majority of it still flows through phone calls, email, and spreadsheets.

This newsletter previews the key themes from those conversations. A deeper industry report is in the works.

Construction spends $600B a year on materials, yet procurement still runs largely on phone calls, emails, and Excel.

Three startups, Kojo, Field Materials AI, and Parspec, are attacking the problem from different parts of the supply chain, betting material procurement will become construction’s next major software category.

Why now?

The opportunity is huge: AI-driven procurement could cut material spend by 5–15%, a massive lever in an industry with 2–3% margins.

For decades, procurement sat in the shadows. Nobody built careers around it. Nobody built software for it. Nobody talked about it at industry events.

When Maria Davidson first appeared on Bricks & Bytes, she described showing up at construction sites with pizza boxes trying to convince people that "materials management" was even a problem worth solving. Today, she has transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman at Kojo, overseeing a company she built in a category that barely had a name when she started.

So what changed? Three forces are converging.

The labor crisis is making waste unforgivable. With 92% of US construction firms reporting difficulty finding workers (AGC, 2025), every wasted hour hits harder than it used to. Materials mismanagement compounds the shortage directly because it idles the labor you do have. Forest Flager puts a number on it: roughly 40% of labor idle time on construction sites traces back to materials not matching to labor.

At the same time, mega-projects are accelerating the pressure. Data center and infrastructure buildouts are pushing contractors to formalize their procurement operations because the scale and timelines leave no margin for manual coordination.

And AI is making automation practical. Document-heavy workflows that were previously untouchable by software can now be handled by specialized agents.

Eldar Sadikov sees the shift playing out in contractor psychology. The historical reluctance to adopt new technology is giving way, driven by the pressure of keeping pace on large-scale projects. "We're living in a really great age as construction tech founders," he says. The urgency from mega-projects combined with AI capability is creating a window that didn't exist five years ago.

Maria describes it as a "renaissance." The most sophisticated contractors now operate more like manufacturing companies: negotiating in advance, locking in stock, hedging prices. That said, these are the companies at the vanguard. A large portion of the industry is still running procurement the way it did in 2018.

Procurement waste rarely shows up as a single line item. It's distributed across the entire project lifecycle in ways that are difficult to see and even harder to measure. That persistence is exactly what makes it so costly.

Foremen spend five to eight hours every week on materials tasks: calling in orders, chasing deliveries, running to Home Depot for last-minute items. That is time pulled directly from installation work. And across projects, Kojo's data shows an average 5% overpayment on materials, with some companies paying 25 to 30% more in certain regions for the exact same products.

The disconnect starts even earlier on the supply side. Forest estimates 30% of design rework stems from poor cost and lead time visibility during early design phases. And in the wholesale distribution channel that serves construction, it takes over 100 hours of labor per $100K sold. "If you compare that to other wholesale industries like auto parts and electronics, it's almost double," he notes.

Half of US contractors still print invoices and hand them to project managers for manual cost coding. Eldar estimates the overhead cost just to process material purchases sits at 5 to 10% of the materials themselves.

These inefficiencies layer on top of each other across every trade, every project, every month. For an industry where contractor margins already sit at 2 to 3%, that compounds into a serious drag on the bottom line.

What makes this moment interesting is that three companies have independently entered through completely different doors in the supply chain. That pattern, where multiple entry points converge on the same problem, is typically how real software categories form.

Kojo targets commercial trade contractors across the US and Canada, covering what Maria calls the "seven steps of procurement" from planning through payment. Customer size ranges from $5M to multi-billion in annual revenue. A telling detail across both of her Bricks & Bytes interviews, years apart: Excel remains their single biggest competitor.

Field Materials AI targets specialty subcontractors and self-performing GCs with a modular platform spanning purchase orders, delivery tickets, invoices, inventory, and pricing intelligence. The platform uses specialized AI agents trained on different document types because a concrete delivery ticket requires fundamentally different domain knowledge than a plumbing invoice.

Parspec targets distributors and manufacturer sales agents, starting in the electrical channel. Its AI-powered product catalog matches design specifications to available products across thousands of manufacturers, and has recently expanded into full project lifecycle management.

The convergence is hard to ignore. When multiple companies enter the same problem from opposite ends of the supply chain, that's typically how real software categories form. 

Eldar believes procurement will stand alongside estimation and project management as its own category within five years.

One insight united all three founders: generic AI tools fall short in procurement. The domain is too fragmented, the document types too varied, and the stakes too high for one-size-fits-all automation.

Eldar's technical framing captures why. Different document types demand different agents with different training. A concrete delivery ticket looks nothing like a mechanical supply order. Each requires specialized domain knowledge that generalist AI simply doesn't have.

Maria's take is practical. "A lot of these steps involve the transmission of data from one system to another, or the reading and reconciliation of that data," she explains. "Those are things that agents are really good at." But she's clear that commercial construction still demands human oversight. The cost of getting something wrong on a complex project is too high to remove the human entirely.

Forest sees a broader shift. AI is fundamentally changing the interface between user and software, and the companies that adapt to this new paradigm will pull ahead of those that don't.

McKinsey research suggests AI-enhanced procurement can reduce procurement spend by 5 to 15% (BDC Magazine, 2025). The three founders we spoke to are building the construction-specific infrastructure to realize that kind of reduction. The opportunity sits in removing the 5 to 10% overhead cost that currently eats into every dollar of materials purchased.

The through line across all three conversations was consistent: procurement is no longer a back-office afterthought. It's becoming a category.

We're building an in-depth industry report on the state of material procurement technology in construction. It will cover product comparisons, implementation challenges, pricing models, and the competitive landscape.

Which part of the supply chain do you think is most broken: field ordering, office coordination, or accounts payable? Reply and tell us. Your answer will help shape the report.