California-based construction tech startup Pegbo, backed by venture capital fund Nirman Ventures and other angel investors in a pre-seed investment round, announced last week to accelerate their mission of helping small and minority businesses in the construction industry.
Certified as a Small Business Enterprise (SBE) by the Californian government, Pegbo’s ethos is to streamline supplier sourcing using its proprietary technology while supporting the participation of local, small, and diverse businesses in construction.
In an interview with Nikhil Choudhary, managing partner at Nirman Ventures, it was revealed that over $1.4 million was raised by Pegbo in the pre-seed round.
Amar Amte, who spent half a decade at Yahoo! and almost a decade at Google in various engineering and managerial roles previously, founded Pegbo in 2023 to tackle the pressing issue of accelerating the participation of local, small, and diverse businesses in the construction industry.
The UC-Berkeley alum took to LinkedIn to announce the newly raised capital and said: “In the last 3 months alone, we doubled our traffic, completed multiple outreach projects with key labels and triggered SaaS revenue in a big way!! Our team remains fully focused on solving user challenges, and this pivotal support from Nirman VC, along with their extensive network, significantly amplifies our impact and reach!”
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Pegbo is a pre-qualified supplier to multiple general contractors like Hathaway Dinwiddie, Skanska, Webcor, and Swinerton—all of which have been listed as California’s Top Contractors by Market Sector in 2020.
Choudhary revealed Pegbo’s next steps in an exclusive with The American Bazaar: “In December, Pegbo is deploying its automated spend tracking tool on several multi-million dollar projects across the nation and we are excited to see the progress and speed at which CEO Amar Amte executes. The team at Pegbo is equally charged hearing about how impressed Pegbo’s customers are, once they see the tool in function.”
The construction tech startup’s current offerings are targeted supplier outreach for government agencies, exceeding diverse vendor spend goals through their supplier diversity program, equipment rental and more.
Pegbo addresses a critical challenge by not only helping government agencies and companies find qualified suppliers but also streamlining the vetting process and enabling tracking of spend and procurement while ensuring compliance with supplier mandates and driving real economic impact, wrote Greg Wallace of Nirman Ventures in a blog.
When asked about the reason behind Nirman Ventures’ decision to invest in Pegbo at this time, Choudhary told The American Bazaar that the partners at Nirman Ventures have spent a significant time as operators in the industry and have seen the problem statement that Pegbo is solving first hand “from a sell side as well as buy side.”
“As local, state and federal jurisdictions demand more transparency into the contractors’ diversity sourcing process, Pegbo has a clear advantage with its state-of-the-art spend tracking solution,” Choudhary noted.
“Pegbo is tackling a small subset of a large market, which is what we like to see,” he added.