Buildpeera construction management and collaboration platform secured $2.5 million in seed funding on Dec. 18, led by Brick & Mortar Ventures. Buildpeer has more than 5,000 users in 900 workplaces in Latin America, with plans to further consolidate in Mexico and expand to more countries.
While Latin American startups like Construex, Licify and Tul focus on marketplaces and streamlining purchases and payments within the region’s construction supply chain, based in Monterey, Mexico Buildpeer it has focused instead on communication.
Mauricio Valdes and Ernesto Gonzalez launched Buildpeer in 2022, after Valdés repeatedly faced challenges communicating with suppliers and subcontractors during his time on large projects. Valdés was a civil engineer at several contractors in Mexico and at Build Group in San Francisco.
As quasi-shoring gains momentum, Mexico’s position continues to attract foreign direct investment, surpassing $36 billion by 2023. This growth has increased the demand for effective cross-cultural communication, a need that Buildpeer addresses by streamlining the collaboration between project teams.
“When I came back to Mexico I saw potential because there was no software in the industry, in the market, and the big companies in the US, the big software, were starting to enter the market, in the big companies, back. in 2018 I see that Procore began to expand in Mexico and [Latin America]” Valdés said. He said that despite the large hospitality and industrial projects being built, people were using WhatsApp for communication, and Dropbox and Google Drive to share documents. “I was seeing other companies, large contractors , who were beginning to use general project management. tools like Monday, Asana and ClickUp, but there was no construction management software made for the Mexican market.”
Buildpeer is a cloud-based platform that tracks schedules, changes and other project information with a focus on collaboration. Contractors can purchase licenses per project or for multiple users. It has a translation engine for English, Spanish and other languages. The SaaS platform includes video tutorials and other information to help workers of any level get trained or better understand concepts like sustainability credits.
“We built a very strong customer service team. We understand that people in Latin America need help sometimes,” says Valdés. “It can be a really informal industry, construction in this market.”
For Brick & Mortar Ventures, the opportunity to invest in a specific platform for Mexico and Central and South America was a good opportunity.
“We didn’t see any other player able to scale,” says Kaustubh Pandya, partner at Brick & Mortar. “One of the fundamental reasons is that the level of service is difficult, and it’s difficult for the big, established players to do it, mainly because the cost base is not there.”
Buildpeer went through Brick & Mortar Ventures’ Formworks accelerator program in 2022.
Pandya said talent recruitment and the ability to rapidly grow revenue from 2018 also drove the investment.
