[Funding alert] Construction management app Powerplay raises $5.2M from Sequoia’s Surge and Accel Partners
The Bengaluru-headquartered startup aims to digitise India’s massive construction industry, where the sector is expected to become the third-largest globally by 2025 and grow by 7.1 percent each year.
Bengaluru-based construction management app Powerplay has raised $5.2 million in funding led by Accel Partners and Surge, a rapid scale-up programme by Sequoia Capital India for startups in India and Southeast Asia. India Quotient and Snapdeal founders also participated in the round.
Powerplay is a free mobile app that connects multiple stakeholders involved in construction, enabling them to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. Project managers, workers, and partners can use this one-stop platform to help them track their progress, deliverables, and payments, as well as streamline the often complex and multi-stakeholder project management process.
Powerplay Founder and CEO Iesh Dixit said, “Powerplay comes at a time when the construction industry in India is ripe for digital disruption. By empowering construction workers and contractors with technology, we are driving the growth of crucial infrastructure required for economic and social progress in the country."
"We’re committed to keep learning from our users, and we will be dedicating the new funding into building a world-class team and product improvements to digitise the industry, one step at a time.”
With the Powerplay app, contractors can not only chart their project completion progress, but use it to track employee attendance, budgeting, and invoicing, as well as issues and material management. Powerplay is an operating system for all construction stakeholders (builders, contractors, and subcontractors) to build projects of all sizes, from tallest buildings to longest roads.
The app claims to have grown swiftly since its launch in October 2020 and is currently used by over 35,000 contractors across 800 Indian cities. Over 5,000+ projects have been managed on the app, with more than 200 hours reportedly saved each week by contractors.
The startup was founded in December 2019 by Iesh Dixit and Shubham Goyal, who both graduated from IIT Roorkee. Lesh previously built a B2B online marketplace that was used by 250 manufacturers and over 10,000 retailers, while Shubham worked at Samsung, where he was part of the team that designed Samsung’s top rated S10 camera software.
Powerplay is part of Surge’s fifth cohort of 23 companies that have developed new digital solutions to help companies and individuals work, live, and learn better in a rapidly evolving Southeast Asian landscape.