How She Grew Kojo to $5 Billion Annual Orders in 5 Years

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Key Takeaways

- Kojo is the largest construction materials procurement platform in the U.S.

- Its founder, Maria Davidson, was an outsider to construction when she decided to create the company.

- Davidson relied on conversations she had with “thousands” of construction workers about pain points in the industry to create Kojo.

Eleven years ago, Maria Davidson was 23 years-old, living in London and working in an entry-level job as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs when she went on vacation in California. While there, she had a chance encounter with Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the venture firm 8VC. This meeting changed the trajectory of her life; in a single hour, he convinced her to quit her job, move to San Francisco and become his chief of staff at 8VC. Lonsdale saw potential in Davidson, and the 8VC team at the time was small.

“He gave me this pitch that Goldman is an incredible place, but you are a cog in a giant wheel,” Davidson tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “There were so many industries that no one was paying attention to on the tech side in the U.S. He got me really passionate about doing something to help improve how those industries work.”

So, in 2015, at the age of 23, Davidson decided to move to the U.S. She knew precisely three people in California at the start, and lived on her friend’s couch for a while as she searched for a place to live longer term.

Maria Davidson. Credit: Kojo

Working with Lonsdale at 8VC exposed her to “big, traditionally unsexy industries” full of broken workflows that affected millions of people but had seen little modern software. So at age 26, in 2018, she left 8VC to start Kojo, committing to spend the next eight years tackling one of the most complex of those industries: construction.

In a handful of years, Kojo was processing more than $5 billion in annual orders and became the largest construction materials procurement platform in the country.

How she got started

Davidson’s path to founding Kojo began far from Silicon Valley. “I got here in a very roundabout way, as many immigrants do,” she says.

She was born in the Soviet Union, then moved to Israel after the Soviet Union collapsed, without knowing a word of Hebrew. She then moved to London when she was 13 without speaking a word of English, completed school there and went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. Her first taste of entrepreneurship was running the Oxford Union.

After college, she worked at Goldman Sachs for a couple of years. “I thought I needed to do the traditional route and follow the traditional wisdom,” she says.

Seeing a broken system

Davidson built Kojo around a simple question: why does it take so long, and cost so much, to build the physical world around us? She points out that the Empire State Building took only about 400 days to construct in the early 1930s, yet something as simple as a San Francisco bus lane took 27 years to complete. Projects, from hospitals to schools, are routinely late and over budget, slowing down city development.

Digging deeper, Davidson realized that for those in the trades, from electricians to plumbers to roofers, roughly 60% of costs are for labor and 40% are for materials. These tradespeople order more than $400 billion worth of commercial materials annually across the U.S. — yet the supply chain for those materials runs on phone calls, emails and text messages. There is little transparency about price, availability or inventory. Mistakes are common: wrong items arriving, double orders, materials lost in warehouses and field teams constantly chasing information.

As a complete industry outsider, Davidson started the process of identifying the problem by showing up on construction job sites with pizza and donuts to get workers to talk. She asked what slowed workers down, what caused delays and what they most hated doing.

“As I had thousands of conversations, I heard time and time again that materials were incredibly frustrating,” Davidson says. “That includes how people dealt with and tracked them. There was very little visibility into when materials were actually arriving and what materials had already been ordered.”

That feedback pushed her to focus on a real-world problem that construction workers felt every day.

Launching the product

The early years were spent simply figuring out what to build. Davidson founded Kojo in 2018, but didn’t bring a product to market until 2020. Kojo’s core product is a procurement platform that unifies field teams, office staff, and distributors in one place. It automates price and inventory comparisons, purchase order creation and communication.

Kojo officially launched the product in the summer of 2020, even though COVID hit and the team briefly feared the company was over. Instead, remote work and illness exposed just how risky it was to have purchasing data trapped in email inboxes and binders. Kojo’s sales took