Canadian construction e-commerce platform RenoRun raises $142M
RenoRun just announced a $142 million Series B round of funding from Tiger Global Management and Sozo Ventures, a few years after a $17.1 million Series 1 round.
Based in Montreal, Quebec, RenoRun is on a mission to simplify the lives of construction managers by enabling them to order and have delivered on-demand thousands of construction products, materials and supplies “with more predictability and reliability” than through existing distributors.
The Canadian startup, founded in 2017, now has 10,000 customers and 500 employees – a number that has grown tenfold since 2019. With this new round of funding, it plans to continue recruiting and plans to accelerate its development in six markets in Canada and the United States (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Montreal and Washington, D.C.), as well as in new cities. RenoRun also plans to offer new financing and split payment options to its customers.
Note: This is the second investment in the construction industry for Tiger Global, one of the world’s largest venture capital funds. In August 2021, Tiger Global participated in a $33 million round of financing for Agora, a platform for managing materials on construction sites.
Dozr, a marketplace specializing in construction equipment rental, raises C$27.5M
Ontario and Florida-based heavy equipment rental startup Dozr wants to expand its model to new markets: to do so, it has just raised $27.5 million Canadian from Silicon Valley’s Builders VC, BDC Capital and BaseCamp Equity Partners. In total, it has raised $44 million since its founding in 2015.
With its marketplace, the startup connects construction companies with 15,000 equipment rental companies across North America. In parallel, Dozr also offers other solutions, such as “WebStores,” a white label tool that allows rental companies to create their own equipment booking interface.
This round of funding will allow Dozr to accelerate its development across the United States, to unify an extremely fragmented market: there are more than 20,000 construction equipment rental companies in North America and few of them have begun to digitize.
Note: in France, the startup Tracktor, positioned on the same subject, raised €12 million in February 2022, from the funds AXA Venture Partners, Bpifrance Digital Venture, Kerala Ventures, BTP Capital Investissement and various business angels.
Israeli startup ElectReon builds its first connected road in the US
Israeli startup ElectReon, which specializes in wireless technologies for “smart roads,” is preparing to enter the U.S. market, with a first project in Detroit.
Since 2013, the company has been developing a system to charge electric vehicles while in motion, using copper coils laid under the asphalt. Receivers are installed underneath the vehicles to transmit electrical energy directly to the motor and battery, while the vehicles are moving. This will eventually solve the problem of the short battery life of electric vehicles.
The company has just won a bid to build an electric road system as part of the “Inductive Vehicle Charging Pilot” program launched by the governor of Michigan in September 2021. The program aims to test electrified roads that, if successful, could help democratize electric vehicles. The pilot will be conducted in partnership with local government, which is investing $1.9 million in the project, as well as Ford Motor Company, Next Energy, DTE Energy and Jacobs Engineering Group.
There’s more:
Buildxact, Australian SaaS construction tools provider raises $18.5M to launch in Europe – Startup Daily
Singaporean startup Hauls, a specialist in collaborative tools for construction sites, raises $8.5M – Tech in Asia
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, heir to Alphabet’s Sidewalk project, is already a unicorn – Financial Post
German startup Cosuno raises $30M to develop its construction site management tools – Tech Crunch
