Construction · Deep dive

SubBase

Trade-specific materials procurement platform for subcontractors and self-performing GCs — RFQ to PO to delivery to invoice reconciliation on one system, wired into the construction ERP.

emerging

The question that decides it: SubBase's wedge is the same one Kojo, Trimble/StructShare, Autodesk and Procore are all now leaning into: materials procurement for subcontractors, run through the ERP. Can SubBase get to category-defining scale on ~$15M raised before Kojo (~$94M, Wesco strategic on the cap table), Trimble (bought StructShare in May 2025 and can bundle procurement into Viewpoint/Vista/Spectrum), Autodesk (Construction Cloud takeoff-to-payables), or Procore (payables plus a Kojo cross-sell) close the wedge on it? The answer conditions are concrete: (a) publicly disclosed GMV or supplier-network numbers crossing ~10% of Kojo's disclosed benchmarks ($5B/yr on 600+ contractors), (b) at least one named strategic distributor — Ferguson, White Cap, Builders FirstSource — building a direct integration into SubBase rather than a rival, and (c) shipped, referenceable production integrations to all three of Sage 300/Intacct, Foundation and Viewpoint Vista within twelve months of the Series A.

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

Snapshot

SubBase, founded in 2022 in Fort Lauderdale and known as Blox before the rebrand, sells materials-procurement software to specialty trade contractors and self-performing general contractors — the electrical, mechanical, plumbing, concrete and drywall firms that buy the physical stuff on a job. It replaces email chains, texts and spreadsheets with a single system: RFQs to a supplier network, quotes back, POs, delivery tracking, three-way invoice reconciliation, and a live sync to the construction ERP. In June 2026 it closed a $7M Series A led by FINTOP Capital (with Fika Ventures), bringing total funding above $15M; the company reports thousands of orders a week on the platform and is on pace to reconcile more than $1 billion of materials volume in 2026. On paper this is a straight-line challenger to Kojo. The uncomfortable part is that Kojo has raised ~$94M, StructShare was bought by Trimble in May 2025, and Autodesk and Procore are both extending toward the same wedge — SubBase has to become a category before the incumbents make it a feature.

Founding story

SubBase is one of the rare construction-tech companies where the founder actually came from the jobsite. Eric Helitzer is a third-generation builder out of Fort Lauderdale, with a Bachelor’s in Construction Management and a Master’s in Building Construction Management from the University of Florida and a LEED AP credential. He spent more than a decade in construction and development as a senior project manager and project engineer — the person on the hook for a schedule slipping when materials show up late or wrong.

The company started as a side project inside the construction firm where he worked. In podcast interviews (Slice of Construction, Henry Harrison, SubBase’s own show) he tells the same story two ways: first he wanted better visibility into his own project spend, and as he began building with a friendly subcontractor he saw the pain move upstream — into accounting, budgeting and the endless back-and-forth between the sub, the vendor and the PM. The initial version was aimed at that manual procurement work. He kept running jobs while building the software; later, a technical co-founder with a construction-tech interest joined and Helitzer went full-time on the company. It launched as Blox in 2022 and rebranded to SubBase — subcontractors as the base of the org chart and the wordplay on “sub base” as the layer under everything.

That founder profile matters. Kojo was started by a Goldman analyst and an 8VC chief of staff who learned the domain in the field. SubBase was started by someone who was the customer. Whether that shows up in retention and expansion is the diligence question below.

How it works

Follow one order. A foreman or PM on a specialty-trade job opens a material list — often derived from a takeoff — inside SubBase and generates an RFQ that fires simultaneously to a shortlist of local suppliers, replacing the phone-and-email round robin. Quotes come back with price and availability; a purchaser compares side by side, awards the order, and SubBase generates the PO with the right cost codes and approval thresholds attached.

At delivery, the receiver logs proof of delivery against the PO, flagging shortages or damage on the spot; a picture of the ticket is uploaded from the phone. When the vendor invoice arrives, SubBase runs a three-way match — PO versus receipt versus invoice — and surfaces discrepancies for the AP clerk instead of letting them slide through into overbilling. Approved invoices post into the ERP.

The two-sided part is the whole point. Suppliers get a free vendor account; the more of them accept RFQs and return quotes electronically, the tighter the loop gets. On its own blog piece with Bricks & Bytes (“Speed Beats Price,” June 2026), the company argues that live order data across its network shows the suppliers winning orders in 2026 are not the cheapest but the fastest to respond — because a crew standing idle costs more than a small price gap when ABC-tracked materials prices are up ~10% year-on-year and iron, steel and copper are tariff-hit. That is a narrative-serving datapoint for a procurement vendor, but it is also the mechanic that makes a network business defensible: response-time data becomes a routing signal the incumbent ERPs cannot replicate without the network.

The AI/intelligence layer that the Series A is meant to fund sits on top of that same order data — learning normal prices, normal lead times and normal supplier performance to surface anomalies and automate parts of purchasing.

Product and business overview

Product is organized as one workflow with role-specific views: field (mobile catalog, material requests, receiving), purchasing (RFQs, quote comparison, POs, expediting), accounting (three-way match, invoice reconciliation, payments) and vendor (a free-to-supplier portal for quotes, POs and invoices). Integrations are the load-bearing part: SubBase publishes connections to Procore, Acumatica, CMiC, ComputerEase, Foundation, Viewpoint Spectrum and Viewpoint Vista, plus QuickBooks Desktop/Enterprise/Online and Sage 300, per its Capterra and Software Advice profiles as of 2026. Sage Intacct and Trimble Vista are the two most-asked construction ERPs; the completeness of that list, and how many are production-referenceable rather than “on the roadmap,” is one of the answer conditions in the open question below.

The customer is deliberately narrow. Per its own site and Software Advice (2026), SubBase targets commercial specialty trade contractors and self-performing GCs above ~$10M in annual revenue with multiple active projects, in concrete and shell, MEP and drywall. That is Kojo’s ICP with a Florida-first, mid-market skew.

Business model and pricing

Subscription SaaS, sold as a tiered platform fee, with unlimited users, unlimited data storage, customer support and training bundled and vendors on for free (per the company’s Frequently Asked Questions page, 2026). SubBase does not publish price points — no per-seat and no per-project charges, according to the same source, is meant as a differentiator against per-user construction tools. That is consistent with a sales-led motion into a low-IT-spend industry: annual contracts with the buyer sized to firm revenue rather than seat count, and vendors seeded free to build the network. The company’s own customer stories (Grycon, KD Construction) cite 7-10% reductions in material spend, which is the ROI number the sales team runs against a subscription.

Two known unknowns. Revenue is undisclosed. Starter Story published a “$600K ARR” figure attributed to Helitzer in a founder breakdown that reads as 2024-era; if that was the ARR before the $4M seed and the $7M Series A, then the trajectory is real but the base is small. The other unknown is take-rate on GMV — SubBase talks about reconciling >$1B in materials volume in 2026, but the SaaS model captures a subscription, not a transaction fee, so the $1B is a scale marker for the two-sided network and not a revenue number.

Traction over time

The gap in this table is the gap in the diligence. Two disclosed rounds, one disclosed staffing number, one disclosed volume trajectory, no disclosed ARR, retention or supplier count. That is normal for a $7M Series A. It is also what the answer conditions in the open question below have to force into public view over the next twelve months.

Market analysis

The numerator is the same one every construction-tech investor has been staring at for a decade: US construction materials spend runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars a year and is still transacted on phone calls, PDFs and re-keyed spreadsheets. Kojo’s own market framing puts materials at ~40% of construction cost against ~60% labor; ABC pegged construction materials prices up nearly 10% year-on-year as of May 2026, with tariff-hit iron, steel and copper leading. Rising input prices, a persistent labor shortage (ABC estimated a 501,000-worker gap entering 2024) and the retirement of a large slice of the trades workforce are all tailwinds for anything that reduces manual work in a contractor’s back office.

The denominator is the same one that has broken standalone construction software before. Contractors run 3-5% net margins and spend the lowest share of revenue on IT of any major industry, roughly 1-2% versus 3-5% economy-wide. That is why the ROI narrative has to be spend reduction (7-10% on materials, per SubBase’s customer stories) and time savings, not a pure workflow productivity pitch, and why the price point has to sit inside what a $10-100M-revenue sub will actually sign.

Competitive intel

The competitive set sorts into three groups, and SubBase’s position in each is different.

The direct rival. Kojo is the company SubBase most resembles and the one it must define itself against. Same procure-to-pay wedge, same subcontractor ICP, same integrations story. Kojo has raised ~$94M through a Battery-led Series C and a September 2025 $10M extension from Wesco (the largest US electrical distributor), 600-plus contractors, $5B/yr of materials on the platform. That is roughly six times SubBase’s capital and, on the disclosed scale markers, roughly five times the GMV. Kojo also has a formal cross-sell agreement with Procore that SubBase does not. SubBase’s argument back is that it is newer, tighter-focused on a mid-market that Kojo has moved above, unencumbered by a distributor on its cap table, and — if the Speed Beats Price piece is representative — building an intelligence layer with real order data rather than model-generated hype.

The bundlers. This is the group that matters most and that has moved decisively in the eighteen months before SubBase’s Series A. Trimble bought StructShare in May 2025 and relaunched it as Trimble Materials inside the Trimble Construction One stack that already owns Viewpoint Vista and Spectrum — the ERPs SubBase has to sync into to sell. That is a native procurement product bundled into the accounting system the buyer already runs. Autodesk Construction Cloud is extending from takeoff into cost, payables and procurement; Procore already ships materials financing and invoice management and can bundle Kojo. Horizontal source-to-pay suites (Coupa, GEP, SAP Ariba) are the corporate-procurement default at the largest self-perform GCs, though they are not construction-native.

The adjacents. Field Materials ($4.7M seed, Blumberg, April 2023) is the closest younger rival, narrower and lighter. Billd and Levelset/Procore Pay sell financing and payments alongside the same wallet without touching the procurement workflow; they are natural partners today and potential bundling threats tomorrow. ConstructConnect and BidCentral run marketplaces on the pre-bid side; Beam AI is the takeoff-side sibling problem, not a procurement product. None of these compete head to head with SubBase in a specialty-trade sales cycle, but each is close enough that a category consolidator could bolt them together.

Where SubBase actually beats Kojo, on paper: capital efficiency, a founder-market fit that Kojo lacked at the same stage, no distributor-conflict on the cap table, and — for a mid-market sub — the promise of not being pushed up-market on price. Where Kojo beats SubBase: scale, brand, integrations depth, an enterprise reference list, and six years of head start on the same product.

History and evolution

• 2022 — Company founded in Fort Lauderdale, Florida as Blox by Eric Helitzer, who continued running construction jobs while building the product.
• 2022-2023 — Rebranded to SubBase; MVP launched into specialty-trade subcontractors in South Florida. Starter Story reports ~$600K ARR from this early period.
• Mar 29, 2024 — Closed a $4M seed round; team scales beyond founders.
• 2024-2025 — Expanded supplier network and ERP integration list to include Procore, Foundation, Viewpoint Vista/Spectrum, CMiC, Acumatica, ComputerEase, QuickBooks and Sage 300.
• May 2025 — Not a SubBase event but a competitive one: Trimble acquires StructShare and rebrands it as Trimble Materials, giving the incumbent construction ERP vendor a native procurement stack.
• Sep 2025 — Not SubBase either, but decisive for the competitive frame: Wesco invests $10M in Kojo at a Series C extension, taking Kojo’s total funding to ~$94M and putting the largest US electrical distributor on its cap table as a strategic.
• Jun 17, 2026 — $7M Series A led by FINTOP Capital, with Fika Ventures. Total funding above $15M. Company reports thousands of orders per week and >$1B/yr materials-reconciliation run-rate.
• Jun 2026 — Publishes “Speed Beats Price” analysis with Bricks & Bytes using its own live-order data to argue supplier response speed, not price, is now the deciding factor in a 10%-inflation materials market.

The stumble that is not in the founder deck: SubBase closed its Series A a year after the two events that materially shifted its competitive position — Trimble buying StructShare and Wesco backing Kojo. The Series A had to be raised against those datapoints, and it was raised at $7M rather than $20M+.

What people say

The case for. Reviewers on Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp (all accessed 2026) describe SubBase as easy to stand up compared to other construction procurement tools, with a customer-success team that customizes the platform to how a given contractor already works. The recurring positive theme is time-savings on procurement busywork — quotes, POs and delivery tickets in one place instead of email plus text plus spreadsheet — and hard-dollar spend reduction, cited at 7-10% on materials in SubBase’s own customer stories (Grycon, KD Construction). Named customers include Grycon (a South Florida GC) and KD Construction. The Refresh Miami piece frames the company as a genuine South Florida construction-tech success; the GlobeNewswire and Finsmes coverage of the Series A repeats the >$1B-in-2026 volume metric and the two-sided-network framing. FINTOP leading, out of a fintech thesis rather than a proptech thesis, is a signal that the interesting part is the payments-plus-workflow layer rather than the CRUD-app procurement piece.

The complaints. Reviewer feedback surfaces the honest weak spots: a small but real learning curve on the way in, and specific requests for better mobile access and a deeper electrical materials catalog — the second of those is exactly the trade Kojo started in and knows cold. The App Store listing for SubBase Mobile is new (2026) and thinly reviewed, which supports the “mobile access could be better” theme. Employer reviews are sparse — 39 employees means there is not enough data for a Glassdoor read yet, which is itself a limitation for anyone diligencing culture. The larger complaints are structural rather than user-reported: (1) capital-thinness — $15M raised versus Kojo’s ~$94M, in a category where the bundlers just consolidated; (2) no disclosed ARR, retention or expansion figures, so the $1B volume line is a network metric rather than a business metric; (3) the co-founder / technical-lead layer is not publicly documented, which is unusual for a Series A company and worth pressing on in reference calls; (4) HQ presence in South Florida is real, but a national supplier and ERP integration play needs a distribution model that is not yet visible in the press.

Outlook: the open question

The question is whether SubBase can reach category-defining scale in materials procurement — on $15M raised — before Kojo ($94M and a distributor strategic), Trimble Materials (bundled into Viewpoint/Vista/Spectrum since May 2025), Autodesk Construction Cloud, or Procore turn the wedge into a bundled module. The bull case is a real one. The founder actually comes from the jobsite, which is rarer in this category than the pitch decks admit. The product surface is complete enough — RFQ, PO, receiving, three-way match, ERP sync — to be a full replacement rather than a point tool. The two-sided network with free vendor accounts is the right shape for a business that gets more defensible with more suppliers on it. The Speed-Beats-Price framing turns response-time data into a routing signal the incumbents cannot replicate without the network. And FINTOP leading out of a fintech thesis suggests the next step is payments and financing on top of the procurement rail — where the take-rate economics get interesting.

The bull case holds if: (a) publicly disclosed GMV or supplier-network numbers cross roughly 10% of Kojo’s disclosed benchmarks ($5B/yr on 600+ contractors) inside twelve months; (b) at least one named strategic distributor — Ferguson, White Cap, Builders FirstSource, Rexel — announces a direct integration into SubBase rather than a rival, giving the network real supplier-side gravity; (c) SubBase ships production, referenceable integrations into all three major construction accounting backends (Sage 300 or Intacct, Foundation, Viewpoint Vista) within twelve months of the Series A, closing the door on the “we already have a system” objection.

The bear case wins if: the two years post-Series A look like slow, sub-scale mid-market wins while Trimble Materials is bundled free into every new Viewpoint contract, Procore’s Kojo cross-sell captures the enterprise sub, Autodesk Construction Cloud absorbs procurement into the drawings stack, and Kojo uses its capital and Wesco channel to move down into SubBase’s mid-market — leaving SubBase as a well-run Florida-first challenger that gets acquired for the team rather than a category. $7M at a Series A after two years of category consolidation is what a market looks like when it has decided it is a feature market, not a platform market. The next twelve months tell us which it is.

How a challenger would attack it

SubBase is itself the challenger — so the attack on it comes from a position it can’t match: distribution someone else already owns. The first vector is the bundle: Trimble Materials ships inside the Viewpoint Vista/Spectrum contracts SubBase must integrate into, and a bundler can price procurement at effectively zero against SubBase’s platform fee — “we already have a system” becomes literally true. The second is the cap-table play SubBase declined: Wesco’s $10M in Kojo shows distributors will fund their preferred rail, and a new entrant that signs Ferguson or White Cap as investor-plus-integration-partner gets supplier-side gravity SubBase’s free vendor accounts can’t buy. Third: exploit the gaps its own reviewers name — the thin electrical catalog (Kojo’s home trade), the new and thinly-reviewed mobile app in an industry where the field buys from a truck cab, and the undisclosed retention numbers a rival’s sales team will weaponize in every bake-off. Fourth: geography — SubBase’s referenceable base is Florida-first, so a rival concentrating on Texas or the Southeast’s other metros builds regional supplier density where SubBase has none. At ~39 people and $15M raised, SubBase cannot defend every flank at once; an attacker only needs one.

Same playbook, new buyer

The procure-to-pay-with-a-supplier-network pattern extends past commercial specialty trades in three directions SubBase has no capacity to take. First, residential: production homebuilders and their trade bases buy the same materials through the same phone-and-PDF chaos, but the ERP landscape (BuilderTrend, ECI) and the buyer psychology differ enough that SubBase’s commercial-first product won’t port without a rebuild — leaving the lane open. Second, adjacent buyer verticals with identical mechanics: landscaping and sitework contractors, utility and telecom-infrastructure subs, and restoration companies all run RFQ-to-invoice on spreadsheets with none of the four bundlers present. Third, the FINTOP thesis inverted: rather than software with financing later, lead with the money — a Billd-style materials-financing provider that gives away the procurement workflow free to originate loans attacks the same wallet with a revenue model contractors’ 3-5% margins actually accommodate, since financing is priced into the job while software is overhead. SubBase can’t follow any of these while its entire Series A is committed to the three answer conditions in its own core market; the playbook is portable precisely because the company running it is not.

Sources and further reading

• SubBase Raises $7 Million Series A to Further Grow and Scale Its Construction Materials Procurement Platform (GlobeNewswire, June 17, 2026)
• Construction-tech startup SubBase raises $7M Series A (Refresh Miami, June 2026)
• Lowenstein Represents FINTOP as Lead Investor in Series A Fund Raise for Construction Material Procurement Platform SubBase (Lowenstein Sandler, June 2026)
• Speed Beats Price: What SubBase’s Order Data Reveals About Materials Buying in 2026 (Bricks & Bytes, June 2026)
• SubBase Raises $7M in Series A Funding (Finsmes, June 2026)
• Establishing a base: Exclusive Q&A with SubBase founder Eric Helitzer (Construction Briefing, 2026)
• How Eric Helitzer Scaled a Construction SaaS to $600K ARR (Starter Story founder breakdown, accessed 2026)
• SubBase 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors (PitchBook, 2026)
• SubBase Technologies $4 Million seed 2024-03-29 (Fundz, March 2024)
• SubBase Software Pricing, Alternatives & More 2026 (Capterra, accessed 2026)
• SubBase Reviews, Pros and Cons (Software Advice, accessed 2026)
• Wesco Invests $10M in Materials Procurement Provider Kojo (Modern Distribution Management, September 2025)
• Inventory & Procurement Management Software — Trimble Materials (ex-StructShare) (Trimble, post-May 2025)