Construction tech startup Agora quadruples funding with Series B round

San Francisco construction technology startup Agora has plans to expand its workforce after a $33 million Series B funding round, the company announced Thursday.

The sum quadruples the $11 million in total funding raised by the three-year-old startup, which had a $4 million seed round in 2018 and a $7 million Series A in November 2020.

The Series B round was led by technology investor Tiger Global with additional investment by the venture capital firm 8VC, Tishman Speyer and Suffolk Construction. 

The funding will go toward hiring across the company's engineering, sales, marketing, product and design teams, a spokesperson said.

Agora, a materials procurement platform for contractors, had not planned to raise more money less than a year after its Series A, CEO and co-founder Maria Rioumine told me, but responded to interest from investors actively approaching the company.

Founded by Rioumine and CTO Ryan Gibson, Agora has seen marked growth over the last year: As of July, revenue is up 760% year over year, and its user base, which Rioumine described as currently “in the hundreds,” has grown by a factor of six. She declined to share revenue or the company's valuation.

Contractors can use Agora’s platform to automate the materials procurement process from requesting quotes all the way through delivery of materials, Rioumine said. Such a platform — something to streamline the procurement process from start to finish — did not previously exist, she said.

In fact, much of the construction industry today still does most of the materials procurement process manually, according to Rioumine, whether that means sinking time into requesting a flurry of quotes one by one or taking half an hour to fill out an order form by hand. (Agora, she says, allows users to do the latter process in less than a minute.)

“Contractors buy Agora because it saves them time and money and helps them operate more efficiently,” Rioumine said. She attributes the company’s explosive growth over the last year to “evangelism” on behalf of existing customers: “when things work, they’ll tell people in communities, their trade associations and their coworkers,” Rioumine said.

The pandemic also served as an accelerant, Rioumine thinks: Procurement tasks that might have been done by hand or via manual input were suddenly harder to do in a remote work environment. 

Agora, which has users in 30 states, currently services exclusively electrical contractors, but is planning an expansion into the mechanical trade at the beginning of 2022. The company currently processes $140 million in materials annually for customers, Rioumine said.