Manufacturing“The technology used by the sell side of the industry has been relatively the same for a few decades now… but this workflow is highly specialized.”
- Forest Flager, CEO and co-founder of Parspec
Dealing with slow, manual procurement workflows, sales agents and distributors struggle to match customer specifications to products, suppliers, and documentation.
Parspec, a California-based startup founded in 2021, is betting that its AI-native platform can untangle this mess. The company recently announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by Threshold Ventures, bringing its total funding to $31 million. Its product: an AI-native platform for construction materials procurement, starting with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) systems: segments that account for a quarter of U.S. construction material spend.
Flager and co-founder Pratyush Havelia were doctoral students at Stanford, building design optimization models. Their goal was to make building designs more efficient by using data like performance specs and environmental impact. But they quickly ran into a major obstacle: finding and maintaining accurate, up-to-date product data across millions of SKUs. They built a suite of web crawlers to automate the process, with the solution eventually evolving into a commercial product.
