The documentation platform Planradar collects 60 million euros. In an industry that has relied on pen and paper for centuries, the Viennese are becoming digital pioneers.
Until recently, digitization had not yet arrived in the construction industry: Agreements are still made verbally and sealed with a handshake, details are written by hand on a piece of paper. On many construction sites, this leads to misunderstandings, a lack of responsibility, inefficiency and – in the worst case – to chaos. The need for intelligent planning software that digitizes and documents work processes is therefore great. That is why the response was extremely high when Planradar launched its product in 2015. The Viennese proptech company of Ibrahim Imam, Sander van de Rijdt, Domagoj Dolinsek, Clemens Hammerl and Constantin Köck combines all the details of a construction project on a software-as-a-service platform.
For example, the foundation layer can communicate with the excavator, or the architect with the bricklayer. “We make communication between everyone involved in construction as easy as possible,” says Ibrahim Imam, who runs the company as Co-CEO together with his former fellow student Sander van de Rijdt. “Anyone who can check Facebook on their cell phone should also be able to use plan radar,” says Imam. The goal is to save time and money for everyone involved. According to the company’s own surveys, the platform saves customers up to seven working hours per week. Insufficient documentation is also prevented, since agreements can be traced at any time. A comparatively small step from a technological point of view, but quite a leap in the analog industry. “Before us, 80 percent of our customers just used pen and paper,” says Imam.
Record totals for the Viennese Proptech
For this, the construction planning scale-up is now collecting more than 60 million euros in a Series B round. The capital round represents the highest Series B financing ever received by a B2B software startup in Austria.Even if this round does not make the young company the expected next unicorn of Austria, it won’t be long in Van de Rijdt’s opinion: “We were already called Soonicorn, now we have become Sooner-Corn.” Lead investors in the round are New York-based VC Insight Partners and French venture capitalist Quadrille Capital. The well-known Berlin VC Cavalry Ventures is one of the existing investors who, according to their own statements, are again “considerable”. Headline (formerly E.ventures), the Berliner Volksbank Ventures and the Austrian federal development bank with their aws Gründerfonds are also repeatedly present. Newcomers are Proptech1
Growth of 250 percent In the previous financing in March 2020, Planradar received 30 million euros in a Series A round – at the time one of the largest start-up capital increases in Austria. At the time, the company said it wanted to use the fresh capital to grow its customer base from 8,000 to 15,000 and drive international expansion.With success: According to its own statements, the proptech has grown by more than 250 percent since then, has around 14,500 customers today and has ten new locations in Europe and Russia.
Customers are Siemens and Rewe
In the meantime, more than 30,000 real estate projects in more than 60 countries are processed via Planradar every week and 100,000 users use the software every day. Well-known customers in German-speaking countries include big names in the construction industry such as Porr, Strabag and Signa, as well as companies such as Siemens, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield and the Rewe Group. “And the port of Hamburg is also one of our customers,” says Van de Rijdt.In many countries there are local competitors – in Germany, for example, Capmo – but Planrader is far ahead of the national competitors in terms of sales, says Sander van de Rijdt: “We are currently generating sales of well over ten million euros.”The really biggest competition, Imam adds, are long-established habits among site managers, foremen, roofers and the like: “We always have to assert ourselves against the ‘team of paper and pencil’,” he says. Note: This article have been indexed to our site. We do not claim legitimacy, ownership or copyright of any of the content above. To see the article at original source Click Here
