Try to imagine the number of parts it takes to make a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you ultimately select, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your headquarters. It's exactly as complex as it sounds, but it doesn't have to be, or so say two brothers who just raised funding to update the procurement process for hardware companies.
Like so many startups, Forge was born out of frustration over outdated tools in an otherwise cutting-edge industry. CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin and Stoke Space. And in each one, he ran into the same maddening problem: getting the parts they needed.
“I became increasingly frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview. “It really got to the point where I felt like what was holding the hardware back was the software tools that everyone was using. “It was making everyone much more inefficient.”
He teamed up with his brother, former software engineer Meta Haris Sahmanovic, to found Forge in May 2023. The pair joined Y Combinator's Winter 2024 cohort, and this $2.1 million seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures includes participation from YC and other angel investors.
Emir characterized the current hardware procurement process as confusing, overly complicated and wasteful. In larger companies, engineers are typically kept out of the process (the procurement request is placed in a “black box,” he said), but they are also typically unaware of procurement orders from other team members.
This quickly leads to problems: Imagine Engineer A needs to order a part and needs it to arrive in time to match Engineer B's schedule, so he pays $20,000 in expedited shipping. But it turns out that Engineer B's part will be late. If they had known, they could have saved themselves the money and the headache.
Delays can also occur for other reasons. Engineers not having a clear idea of their team's purchasing histories or suppliers' capabilities can lead to a lack of understanding of what needs to be ordered, when, and from whom.
“It's a waste of time for an engineer, it's a waste of time for the supply chain team, and it's a waste of money for the company,” Emir said.
Many existing acquisition tools are used simply as a place to store data, but that's not where the work gets done: that's done in email chains, spreadsheets, and PDF files. It is not standardized. Forge's system uses an artificial intelligence model to analyze the supplier's response (whether the quote comes in a spreadsheet, text email, or PDF) and integrate that information into its platform.
For that reason, vendor adoption is not necessary for companies to run Forge, a hurdle that has hampered other standardization attempts. This is a “great core value,” Emir said. “You can never get (vendors) to adopt it because they have 20 different customers. “They’re not going to learn 20 different tools for 20 clients.”
Engineers can also create custom workflows based on business needs, which is critical, especially for larger rather than smaller businesses. More than just order tracking, Forge's software also includes intake request management, purchasing workflows, quote matching, and automated onboarding and supplier performance tracking.
Forge already has paying customers, and the two brothers plan to use the seed funding to attract more by improving the product and growing their team (of two people).
