SymTerra, a communications platform for the construction project supply chain from London, has closed its first seed round at $1.7 million. The investment came from a global investor base led by Samaipata with participation from Nemetschek, Pi Labs, and Accel.
The fresh funds will be used to grow the team, introduce a freemium subscription, and broaden the platform. By the end of the year, SymTerra expects to have tripled the size of its workforce thanks to high demand from current clients and the exploration of prospects in new areas.
“This funding, with the apparent support of a solid investor base, allows us to increase our workforce, introduce our freemium subscription, and extend the platform,” said co-founder Sarah Crawley. Our goal is to establish ourselves as the communication standard for construction sites.
“We are happy to be leading SymTerra’s Seed round on their mission to become the site communication pipeline for construction with real-time information exchange,” says Jose del Barrio, General Partner at Samaipata. We think Sarah and John have the right mix of motivation, aptitude, and expertise to take on this enormous business given their breadth of project management experience in the construction sector.
We are delighted to have taken part in this investment round, said Tanja Kufner, Head of Startups & Venture Investments at the Nemetschek Group. It perfectly complements our aim of promoting innovation and digitalization along the whole construction value chain. SymTerra can access a vast number of customers with their solution thanks to Nemetschek’s global network, boosting the sector’s productivity and efficiency.
According to Hugo Silva, Senior Investment Manager at Pi Labs, “We have watched SymTerra go from strength to strength since we first met them and on our Growth Programme, demonstrating their ability to win high profile clients and become a technology leader in a sector that has historically been slow to adopt digital technology. On construction sites, miscommunication and uncertainty are a very real problem that Sarah, John, and the team are working to overcome.
The huge and established construction sector needs data to be optimised, but in order to obtain that data, you must create a product that employees will be eager to use, according to Rika Christanto, an investor in Accel Starter. The SymTerra team overcame this major obstacle by developing a mobile-first platform with built-in virality thanks to their extensive industry knowledge.
Sarah Crawley and John Ryan, a husband and wife team, launched SymTerra in 2021. Through its communication, cooperation, and visibility tools, the “Slack for construction platform” aims to remove uncertainty from the construction industry. Due to miscommunication on the job site, over 30% of construction expenses are directly tied to rework and delays, which is said to contribute to the $280 billion rework problem in the industry.
The establishment and streamlining of data flow from site teams must be simple, quick, intuitive, and designed for employees.
Within six months of its debut, SymTerra made New Civil Engineer’s shortlist for the finest smart data gathering on a Kier project. It recently joined Pi Lab’s 2022 Growth Programme.
Image Credit: SymTerra
