Construction materials startup GlobalFair raises $20 million from Lightspeed, others

• The fundraise was led by Lightspeed with participation from Saama Capital, India Quotient, AUM Ventures and Stride Ventures.
  
• GlobalFair solves manufacturing and procurement problems for the building materials industry across the US.
  
• The fund will be used to deepen their manufacturing base across India and Vietnam.

GlobalFair, a technology-first global supplier of building materials in the cross-border space, on Thursday said it had raised $20 million through a mix of equity and debt in a Series A round.

The fundraise was led by Lightspeed with participation from Saama Capital, India Quotient, AUM Ventures and Stride Ventures.

The fund will be used to deepen their manufacturing base across India and Vietnam, launch capital finance solutions and build a sustainable end-to-end synchronised cross-border supply chain accessible at one click to the global buyer.

The global construction and building market is worth $1.4 trillion across the world, with a $240 billion market just in the US spread across 700,000 construction contractors, said GlobalFair.

“The construction industry has traditionally been unorganised with low to zero penetration of technology. This leads to low reliability and transparency across the supply chain especially when viewed from the cross-border lens,” GlobalFair said.

GlobalFair is trying to build a border-less trade economy and specialises in ready-to- install custom products across multifamily residential and commercial hospitality segments in the US.

“The pandemic exposed structural issues in cross-border supply chains and heightened the need for transparency, visibility and diversification in procurement, GlobalFair is using technology to address these issues for the global construction and building materials industry and we are excited to back the team as they modernise the industry and create new trade corridors,” Bejul Somaia, Partner, Lightspeed said.

GlobalFair allows customers to start interacting with their 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.

The company plans to expand the current 110 member team spread across US, Vietnam and India and launch new supply bases.

“With India and Vietnam set out to become the de-facto factories of the world, we love how GlobalFair is using technology to bridge the capacity gap and leverage economies of scale,” said Anand Lunia, Partner, India Quotient.

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