Construction · Deep dive

Kojo

Materials procurement and inventory software for trade contractors — takeoff to PO to delivery to invoice on one platform, now with a distributor, Wesco, as both investor and supplier.

emerging

The question that decides it: Kojo's value is a vendor-neutral layer that lets a contractor compare price and stock across Ferguson, Rexel, Mayer and Wesco and route the PO to whoever wins. Now Wesco — the largest US electrical distributor — is its biggest strategic investor and co-development partner. Can Kojo stay the neutral transaction layer between contractors and distributors when the largest distributor node both funds it and can build punchout/EDI procurement itself, or does the network tilt toward one supplier and lose the neutrality that is the whole point?

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

Kojo, founded in 2018 in San Francisco and known as Agora until 2022, sells materials-procurement and inventory software to trade and self-perform contractors — the electrical, mechanical, plumbing, concrete and drywall firms that buy the physical stuff a project is made of. Materials are ~40% of construction cost and still bought on phone calls, PDFs and re-keyed spreadsheets; Kojo puts takeoff, quoting, ordering, delivery, warehouse inventory, tool tracking and invoice matching on one platform that syncs to the ERP. As of 2025 it reports 600-plus contractors across the US and Canada moving over $5 billion of materials a year, on $94 million raised from Tiger Global, Battery Ventures, 8VC and — the twist that defines its next chapter — a $10 million 2025 strategic check from Wesco, the largest US electrical distributor. It is a real mid-stage business that has also cut staff and hit the ceiling of what a low-margin industry pays for software.

Founding story

Kojo came not from the trades but from a finance operator staring at a broken city. Maria Davidson (then Rioumine) read PPE at Oxford, ran the Oxford Union, did two years as a Goldman Sachs analyst, and in 2016 was recruited to San Francisco by 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale as his chief of staff. Living amid the densest concentration of technologists on earth, she kept asking why that city still could not build housing or fix a pothole in under months. She left 8VC; Ryan Gibson left Microsoft (bringing a multi-generation construction family history); Micah Rodman left Bridgewater. Six months of field interviews produced the two numbers that set the strategy: labor is ~60% of building cost and materials ~40%, and price transparency alone could save 3-5% on materials.

They launched in March 2020 as Agora, starting deliberately in electrical — the largest US trade, $200 billion-plus in revenue, with numerous SKUs and opaque pricing. The first 100 customers landed within about eighteen months. In 2022 the company rebranded from Agora to Kojo and widened into eight trades, repositioning from an electrical tool into a horizontal procurement platform for specialty contractors.

How it works

Follow one order. A contractor does a takeoff — the list of what a job needs — and in Kojo that becomes a quote request fired at multiple vendors at once, with price and stock pulled back in real time via direct supplier and EDI integrations instead of phone tag. The field side is deliberately consumer-grade: an “Amazon-like” catalog where a foreman builds a cart and submits a material request from a phone. Requests route into a PO with approval thresholds — small orders clear automatically, large ones escalate to a PM or owner.

When goods arrive, the receiver uploads proof of delivery against the PO number, flagging shortages on the spot. The Warehouse module tracks general and job-specific stock in real time so purchasing can restock before a crew is idle; Tool Tracking does the same for tools (check-in/out, status). At the accounting end Kojo runs a three-way match — PO versus proof of delivery versus invoice — surfacing discrepancies side by side; by June 2023 its Automated Invoice Matching had processed $9.2 million and caught errors on 27% of invoices. Contractors can pay inside Kojo, and every step syncs to the ERP: Procore, Autodesk, Viewpoint Vista and Spectrum, Foundation. Supplier integrations connect Ferguson, Mayer and Rexel. In September 2023 Kojo added an AI “Intelligence Layer” — what is in stock now, what an item cost last time, how much was bought last year — and the 2025 roadmap pushes toward agents that chase distributor follow-ups and schedule releases.

Product and business overview

Kojo is sold as modules around a procure-to-pay spine: Purchasing (multi-vendor RFQs), Field (mobile catalog), Warehouse (inventory), Tool Tracking, Operations (spend analytics), Accounting (three-way match and payments), and a Vendor product that automates POs, acknowledgements, shipping notices and invoices over EDI for suppliers. It bills itself as a “one-stop shop for purchasing and inventory” connecting field, office, warehouse, accounting and — increasingly — the distributor.

The customer is a trade or self-perform general contractor across MEP, concrete, drywall, glazing, roofing and flooring. Named users range from mid-size specialists (Kleinknecht Electric, Arrow Electric, Vertical Mechanical Group) to enterprise design-build firms — Power Design Inc. (1,700-plus completed projects) adopted Kojo as its procure-to-pay platform in November 2023; the Concrete Foundations Association became a preferred-vendor channel in 2022.

Business model and pricing

Kojo is SaaS, sold as a custom subscription with unlimited users and data and a dedicated account manager; it does not publish prices. That cuts two ways. It signals an enterprise, sales-led motion — good for expansion and multi-year deals — but every contract is negotiated into an industry that spends only 1-2% of revenue on IT (versus 3-5% economy-wide) at 3-5% net margins. A competitor’s employee (Tegus, September 2022) described Kojo as perceived “up-market” — priced above what much of a cost-obsessed contractor base wants to pay. Revenue is undisclosed; the only signals are rate-of-change — ARR up a reported 760% YoY at the 2021 Series B, 3.5x YoY at the 2022 Series C — impressive multiples off a small base, consistent with a company that then had to cut costs.

Traction over time

A genuine scale-up, but not a straight line. From launch in 2020 to $1B of materials processed and 90 people by the 2022 Series C, to $2B/year and 25,000 projects by 2024, to $5B/year and 600-plus contractors by 2025, throughput has grown fast. The gap between platform GMV ($5B) and Kojo’s own revenue (undisclosed) is the whole diligence question — and the stretch between the 2022 Series C and the 2025 extension included layoffs and three years without a priced up-round, closed instead by a distributor’s strategic check.

Market analysis

The numerator is enormous, the denominator stingy. Roughly $9.7 trillion was spent on construction globally in 2022 (Construction Briefing), materials ~40% of that — ~$4 trillion of materials a year that Kojo sits next to. The software slice is smaller and estimates vary: construction-tech ~$5 billion in 2023 growing to ~$24.2 billion by 2033 at 16.9% CAGR (Future Market Insights); a narrower construction-software figure runs to ~$7.5 billion by 2032 (Market Research Future). The tailwind is labor: the ABC estimated a 501,000-worker shortfall entering 2024, with 40%+ of the workforce set to retire within a decade. The headwind is the customer’s wallet — low margins and the lowest IT-spend ratio of any major industry — the perennial “huge TAM, hard to monetize” construction-tech epitaph.

Competitive intel

The field splits three ways. Direct rivals are smaller and lighter: StructShare (2017, $8M seed) matches Kojo on trades and AI and beat it to a Procore integration but lacks its warehouse/tool-tracking depth; Field Materials (2022, $4.7M seed) is narrower still. Kojo is the best-funded and most complete of this cohort. The bundlers are the real gravity: Procore ($11.5B market cap, March 2024) owns the GC relationship and can extend into invoicing — though it chose to cross-sell Kojo rather than build against it — while horizontal suites (Coupa, GEP, SAP Ariba) are the corporate-procurement default for the largest contractors despite not being construction-native. The distributors are the wildcard: Wesco, Ferguson and Rexel already run punchout, EDI, vending and VMI and could route contractors onto their own rails. Kojo’s edge is neutrality plus depth — the only one comparing price and stock across distributors and running the order to a three-way match. Its exposure: the depth is a product lead, not a moat, and the neutrality is now complicated by who is on the cap table.

History and evolution

• 2018 — Founded in San Francisco as Agora Systems by Maria Davidson (née Rioumine) and Ryan Gibson, with Micah Rodman and founding engineers.
• Oct 2020 — $7M Series A led by 8VC (Tishman Speyer, Suffolk, Abstract, BoxGroup); product had launched as Agora in March 2020, starting in electrical.
• Aug 2021 — $33M Series B led by Tiger Global; company reports 760% YoY ARR growth.
• May-Sep 2022 — Rebrands from Agora to Kojo and expands from electrical into eight trades; $39M Series C led by Battery Ventures (Schneider/SE Ventures, RXR, Bienville, Human Capital, Suffolk, 8VC); ~90 employees, $1B+ materials processed; named SaaS Awards’ best construction SaaS product.
• 2022-2023 — Layoffs. Glassdoor reviews describe staff told cuts were not coming, then cut ~two months later, with heavy attrition beneath the ~129-person 2024 headline.
• Jun-Sep 2023 — Expands into mechanical; Automated Invoice Matching hits $9.2M processed (27% error catch rate); launches the AI “Kojo Intelligence Layer.”
• Nov 2023 — 25K projects, 15K+ professionals, 47 states; Power Design Inc. adopts Kojo as its procure-to-pay platform.
• Sep-Oct 2025 — Wesco invests $10M (its largest-ever tech investment) in a Series C extension, taking the round to ~$49M and total funding to $94M; the two co-develop tools, first shipping “Project POs” for long-lead-time orders including data-center construction. Kojo reports 600+ contractors and $5B+ materials/year.

What people say

The case for. Customers on G2, Capterra and Software Advice (2026) call Kojo a game-changer that collapses procurement busywork — faster ordering, real-time spend visibility, fewer re-keyed invoices — and praise a clean interface for a construction tool. The product is unusually complete (procurement plus real inventory, warehouse and tool tracking, plus a genuine three-way match), and the invoice-matching stat (errors caught on 27% of invoices) is the hard-dollar proof contractors respond to. Enterprise wins (Power Design) and Procore cross-selling rather than competing are third-party validation. Glassdoor sentiment is net positive on paper — ~4.1 of 5, ~86% recommending — with praise for a strong remote culture and a bright C-suite.

The complaints. The same Glassdoor page holds the honest negatives. Multiple reviews describe layoffs that followed explicit reassurances there would be none, high attrition (“the odds of making it past 18 months are slim”), thin career progression, pointed titles (“Kojo is Failing”), and a specific allegation that some account executives treated female colleagues poorly. On product, the recurring theme is price and adoption friction — a learning curve on advanced features and Kojo being perceived as up-market in an industry that buys software the way it buys commodities. And the two facts absent from the deck: three years between the 2022 Series C and a 2025 round that was a distributor’s extension rather than a priced institutional up-round, and no disclosed revenue or retention to judge whether $5B of GMV converts into a venture-scale software business.

Outlook: the open question

Kojo becomes a category if it stays the neutral, must-use transaction layer between contractors and every distributor — winning because it compares price and stock across Ferguson, Rexel, Mayer and Wesco and runs the order end to end; it becomes a feature if the network tilts toward one supplier, or if distributors and Procore make “good enough” procurement native to the rails contractors already use. The product is real and unusually complete, the wedge (materials are 40% of cost, bought on paper) is genuine, and 600 contractors moving $5B a year is not vaporware. But the defining tension is now on the cap table. Wesco’s $10M is validation, distribution — and a channel conflict. Kojo’s promise is neutrality: a contractor trusts it because it is not a distributor and routes the PO to whoever wins on price and lead time. The moment the largest electrical distributor is also the largest strategic investor and co-development partner, every rival distributor and contractor has to ask whether the recommendations point to the best price or to Wesco. The bull case holds if Kojo keeps signing multi-distributor integrations and its non-Wesco GMV keeps growing, if the Wesco partnership ships genuinely neutral tooling without preferencing Wesco stock, and if pricing power shows up as net-dollar retention above ~120%. The bear case wins if order flow visibly concentrates toward Wesco, if Ferguson- and Rexel-side contractors defect, or if distributors’ own punchout/EDI plus Procore’s bundle make a standalone neutral layer redundant. Three years without a priced up-round says the market has not decided; the next round, and who leads it, will.

How a challenger would attack it

The wedge is neutrality — the thing Kojo just sold. A challenger would position as the Switzerland Kojo can no longer be: “we take no distributor money, our price comparison points wherever the best price is.” Every Ferguson- and Rexel-loyal contractor now has a reason to listen, and every rival distributor has a reason to integrate with the challenger first. Second vector: price. Kojo is custom-priced, sales-led, and perceived as up-market in an industry that spends 1-2% of revenue on IT at 3-5% net margins — Field Materials and StructShare already compete on being lighter and cheaper, so a challenger would publish transparent per-seat or per-GMV pricing and self-serve onboarding, converting the mid-market Kojo’s account-manager motion can’t profitably touch. Third: AI-native procurement. Kojo bolted an “Intelligence Layer” onto a 2020-era workflow product; a challenger builds agents that do the RFQ blast, chase distributor follow-ups, and reconcile invoices from day one, undercutting the module-by-module upsell. Kojo’s depth (warehouse, tool tracking, three-way match) is a product lead, not a moat — the file says so itself — and three years without a priced up-round plus layoff-scarred Glassdoor reviews mean the challenger can also out-recruit it.

Same playbook, new buyer

The most promising shift is trade-vertical and down-market: framing, which Kojo did not serve as of 2024, plus the long tail of sub-$50M contractors priced out of a negotiated enterprise contract — same procure-to-pay spine, sold at commodity prices with self-serve setup. Kojo won’t follow easily because its unit economics are built around dedicated account managers and custom contracts; chasing small contractors would cannibalize its enterprise positioning while its post-layoff team is stretched. The second shift is geographic: Kojo covers only the US and Canada, but the materials problem — 40% of cost, bought on phone calls and PDFs — is global against ~$4 trillion of annual materials spend. A European or Gulf-market clone faces different distributors, VAT and ERP stacks Kojo has no integrations for. Third, flip the customer: Kojo’s Vendor product hints at it, but a supplier-side platform sold to regional distributors as their answer to Wesco-Kojo — arming the mid-tier distributors the Wesco deal just alienated — turns Kojo’s channel conflict into the pitch.

Sources and further reading

• Report: Kojo Business Breakdown & Founding Story (Contrary Research, March 2024)
• Construction tech startup Kojo rebrands, expands and lands $39M in Series C funding (TechCrunch, September 2022)
• Construction tech startup Agora raises $33M in Tiger Global-led round amid 760% YoY ARR growth (TechCrunch, August 2021)
• Wesco Invests $10M in Materials Procurement Provider Kojo (Modern Distribution Management, September 2025)
• Wesco invests in Kojo to build AI procurement tools for construction (Digital Commerce 360, September 2025)
• Kojo Poised to Revolutionize Construction Materials Management (Business Wire, October 2025)
• Maria Davidson Builds Kojo To Make Construction More Efficient (Forbes, October 2023)
• Kojo Adds Power Design Inc. as Key New Enterprise Partner (PR Newswire, November 2023)
• Kojo Technologies Reviews (Glassdoor, accessed 2026)
• Kojo Software Pricing, Alternatives & More (Capterra, accessed 2026)