B2B Building Materials Startup GlobalFair Raises $20 Mn From Lightspeed, Others

B2B building materials startup GlobalFair has raised $20 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Lightspeed. The round, a mix of equity and debt, also saw participation from Saama Capital, India Quotient, AUM Ventures, and Stride Ventures.

GlobalFair will use the fresh funds to grow its team, scale business, and build new products. The startup aims to strengthen its manufacturing base across India and Vietnam, launch capital finance solutions, and build a sustainable end-to-end synchronised cross border supply chain.

Founded in 2020 by Shaily Garg and Ashish Chandra, GlobalFair supplies building materials and ready-to-install finishes for residential and commercial developments such as modular kitchen, flooring, countertops and vanity tops, door and windows, and fences, among others. It currently caters to over 13 categories, and aims to expand its offerings to more than 80 categories. 

With its tech solution, the startup allows customers to start interacting with its platform across all stages of the traditional process – from building cost estimates using architectural plans and shop drawings to real-time GPS enabled tracking of final delivery of the materials as per installation schedules on job sites.

It also helps optimise supply chain costs by maximising load capacity utilisation and using predictive demand manufacturing models, enabling a split between standard and custom demand SKUs on the demand side.

“With a clear focus on affordability and sustainability in the current real estate market, our technology first solution has transformed the global supply chain of building materials. Through a 3 way buyer, supplier and provider integration, our in-house software has automated the entire “discovery to discovery” lifecycle of an order,” GlobalFair CEO Garg said. 

While the California-based startup’s customer acquisition and customer experience teams are based out of the US, its supply, operations, and logistics teams are based out of India and Vietnam, which are its key supplier markets.

The US is the primary demand market for GlobalFair. “We aim to be completely cross-border focused as the entire supply chain and quality of cross-border procurement is very different from fulfilling domestic demand,” Garg said. 

 “Our mission is to open up production pockets across the Indian and SEA source markets to bring that manufacturing 4.0 production reliability and give our MSME suppliers an access to global demand. We want to go deeper in capturing capacity with GlobalFair’s qualified suppliers and work with them to build manufacturing capacity wherever needed,” she added.

GlobalFair competes with the likes of SourceRFX, VenWiz, and WWI Sourcing. The startup claims to have grown 300% year-on-year in the past 18 months. It has operations in 36 states in the US where it supplies building materials to small ($10 Mn-50$ Mn) and big projects ($100 Mn-$500 Mn). 

Last year, GlobalFair raised $2 Mn in a seed funding round led by Saama Capital and India Quotient, with participation from CRED founder Kunal Shah, Razorpay founder Harshil Mathur, among others.

The construction industry has traditionally been unorganised, with very low penetration of technology. This leads to low reliability and transparency across the supply chain, especially when viewed from a cross-border lens. GlobalFair wants to tap into this gap with the help of technology.

The global construction market was valued at $609.6 Bn in 2021, and was estimated to clock a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 6% from 2023 to 2026, as per a report.