Parspec – an AI-powered software platform that streamlines the selection and sale of construction products – announced its oversubscribed $11.5 million seed round. Innovation Endeavors led the investment, with participation from Building Ventures, Heartland Ventures, and Hometeam Ventures. Two investors joined the board in connection with the investment: Innovation Endeavors’ Josh Rapperport as a board member and Building Ventures’ Allen Preger as a board observer.
Launched in 2021, Parspec is transforming the $1.7 trillion global construction materials market by providing better information and online workflows to support the procurement process. Parspec is initially focused on serving sales agencies and distributors of lighting and electrical products. The company works with three of the top ten lighting agencies and four of the five largest electrical distributors in the United States, including Sonepar, Graybar, Rexel, and CED.
The benefits reported by Parspec customers include cutting time to quote in half and enabling teams to bid 6-15% more jobs. And customers have increased win rates by quoting products their customers are more likely to accept. As a result, customers have seen a significant increase in top-line revenue and profitability.
KEY QUOTES:
“To select products today, practitioners typically compare design specifications to technical product documentation hosted on thousands of manufacturer websites. It is a time consuming and error-prone process that contributes to procurement costs (in construction) that are nearly double comparable industries. Parspec uses AI to instantly identify spec-compliant products and associated documents, reducing labor by more than 50% compared to manual methods while improving compliance.”
- Parspec’s CEO and co-founder Forest Flager, who earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and previously led software at Katerra
“With Parspec at our disposal we’re more efficient than competitors doing it the old way. That means I can go out there and capture market share.”
- Eli Basset, Manager at CED in San Francisco
“Parspec isn’t just another software solution. It’s critical to our business.”
- Netesh Gohil, Vice President of Operations at SESCO Lighting; SESCO is the largest lighting sales agency in the United States and has been a Parspec customer since 2022.
“Recent advances in AI have enabled us to reinvent the product selection, quoting and submittal process for our customers. We utilize cutting-edge NLP & computer vision models to enable contextual, hybrid and image-based searches, LLM-based document summarization, and a personalized product recommender system across a live database of over 2 million configurable product families that is growing daily.”
- Pratyush Havelia, Parspec’s CTO and co-founder
“Parspec is already improving the way construction interacts with its supply chain through its AI platform. The team is uniquely suited to collaborate with the industry to solve entrenched problems using advanced machine learning based on LLMs and multimodal models. We couldn’t be more excited to support them as they improve supply chain efficiency — and the sustainability of the built environment.”
- Josh Rapperport, Investor at Innovation Endeavors
