A European PropTech View, with Fritz Cramer, Cosuno

Welcome back to ‘A European PropTech View, by Dilan Omari-Clark’ our Q&A focused on European PropTech’s.

This week we have been in touch with Fritz Cramer, Managing Director of Cosuno.

Cosuno are the number 1 for tendering and subcontractor management in the construction industry. The company develops software for the construction industry. Digitisation is already driving productivity in many areas of the economy, but the construction industry has some catching up to do. Problems such as the tedious sending of e-mails, the uncoordinated collection of offers and a poor overview when comparing them are solved by their intuitive software. A clear tendering process and the possibility to manage all relevant construction documents in one place ensures more efficiency in construction projects and a better return. Cosuno’s aim is to constantly drive the change in the construction industry with innovative methods and digital processes and to continue to develop simple and transparent solutions and to continuously improve them. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Berlin, Germany.

At what point did you realise there was a gap in the market and you had the product for it?

My co-founder and I worked on a consulting project for a huge construction supply company and we always saw the same problem which is the inefficiency and lack of transparency of the procurement processes in construction. It’s the phase before the project starts and where most costs are defined by contracting subcontractors in each of the 50+ crafts (roofer, tiler, etc.). This phase is characterised by a very inefficient and time-consuming process in an intransparent market which is the ideal combination for our SaaS-enabled-Marketplace.

Why is it so important for construction companies to be innovating?

First of all, construction is one of the largest and most collaborative industries in the world. But it is also one of the least digital industries and it has not increased its productivity over the last decades. This leads to a cost problem, projects take longer and cost more than planned. This problem can be seen as a huge potential for change and we are seeing that construction companies are picking up their pace of innovation drastically. When looking at the construction lifecycle there is a lot of room for innovation in each of the phases, especially in procurement, the phase we serve.

What are the main challenges you have come across when digitising the construction process?

Construction has innovated slowly and there is a good reason for that. Projects and very individual companies tend to operate regional and hundreds of stakeholders are involved. So the challenge is really to offer a 10x better solution that pays off on the same project. To do so it’s crucial to raise money and find the best talents from around the world to build a product that is extremely useful and user-friendly.

Future of PropTech, what do you think is going to be important this year?

I think it is crucial to bring more awareness to PropTech and ConTechs because those are the companies that drive change, not old incumbents. As mentioned before, the construction industry did not increase its productivity in decades whilst the need for construction rises and with it the pressure to be efficient.

We should make the PropTech/ ConTech sector more popular since they help one of the most important industries of the world.

What is a frequently asked question you get about your product?

Is it really that good?

What are your long-term plans for your business?

From a product perspective, we will add more features to our SaaS to cover even more processes to make our customers save time and money. From a commercial perspective, we will expand into Europe to become the dominating European player in construction software.

And from a hiring perspective, we want to grow our team with the strongest talents around. We do not only hire talents within Germany, we already have talents working from various countries like the Netherlands, Sweden or Portugal for us.

Do you have any recent successes you want to mention?

Our latest success is closing our Series A funding, where we raised $15 million, led by US investor Spark Capital. We are extremely proud to have strong and experienced investors backing us to deliver on our mission to become Europe’s pre-eminent ConTech startup. Also, we got rewarded with some prizes, like the bauTec innovation award and the Bau2021 award.

Overall, we are proud of our journey and happy to deliver a useful SaaS solution that saves our customers money and time they can use on other things.