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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. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe gave me this pitch that Goldman is an incredible place, but you are a cog in a giant wheel,\u201d Davidson tells Entrepreneur<\/em> in a new interview. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s couch for a while as she searched for a place to live longer term.\u00a0<\/p>\n Working with Lonsdale at 8VC exposed her to \u201cbig, traditionally unsexy industries\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Davidson\u2019s path to founding Kojo began far from Silicon Valley. \u201cI got here in a very roundabout way, as many immigrants do,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n After college, she worked at Goldman Sachs for a couple of years. \u201cI thought I needed to do the traditional route and follow the traditional wisdom,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to complete. Projects, from hospitals to schools, are routinely late and over budget, slowing down city development.<\/p>\n 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. \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs I had thousands of conversations, I heard time and time again that materials were incredibly frustrating,\u201d Davidson says. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n That feedback pushed her to focus on a real-world problem that construction workers felt every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n The early years were spent simply figuring out what to build. Davidson founded Kojo in 2018, but didn\u2019t bring a product to market until 2020. Kojo\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s sales took off as contractors sought centralized, digital visibility into materials.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Kojo grew astonishingly fast once it launched. In mid-2020, it was processing $0 in materials orders. Within five years, it was handling over $5 billion annually across more than 75,000 job sites, Davidson discloses.\u00a0<\/p>\n She adds that the company saved over two million labor hours for construction workers last year alone, by cutting field workers\u2019 time on phones and emails and eliminating about 75% of office teams\u2019 manual data entry.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the materials side, Kojo helps contractors save roughly 3% to 5% per order, according to Davidson.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company raised a $7 million Series A<\/a> in the fall of 2020, a $33 million Series B<\/a> in the fall of 2021 and a $39 million Series C<\/a> in the fall of 2022. In the fall of 2025, Kojo raised a $10 million Series C extension<\/a> from Wesco, the largest electrical distributor in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n Early on, many investors told Davidson that construction firms didn\u2019t want software. She relied on a handful of believers and small early checks to build a prototype. Only from the Series A funding round onward did strong metrics and customer enthusiasm start to flip investor sentiment.<\/p>\n Davidson says that the most important strategy for growth is building close relationships with customers from the very beginning. She understood from the start that construction is a word-of-mouth industry. The most important thing to do in the early days, she says, was to build an \u201cextremely loyal\u201d group of evangelists who loved the product and told everyone around them about it.<\/p>\n From that point, Davidson started hiring a sales team that was constantly on the phone with contractors, asking about their biggest pain points. The team tried to figure out the issues and send feedback to the product division, so that the product was constantly improving over time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Through the process of scaling from zero to $5 billion, Davidson also realized that there are a lot of things that traditional investor wisdom tells you to do that you should actually not do.<\/p>\n She gave the example of investors urging her to hire seasoned executives with fancy titles after a fresh funding round. Instead of following that wisdom, she relied on internal promotions to make Kojo grow.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we found is being able to promote people from within allowed us to scale our teams much more effectively because those people knew how to do the work,\u201d Davidson says. \u201cThey actually knew the product, they knew the customer.\u201d<\/p>\n Davidson adds that it was important for her to approach a field like construction with a true beginner\u2019s mindset. She didn\u2019t have any preconceived notions about the way things worked and was able to assess the industry with a fresh pair of eyes.\u00a0<\/p>\n She also emphasizes deep curiosity \u2014 when a process looks broken, there is usually a reason it evolved that way.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to solve it, you need to solve from a place of empathy and understanding why things are the way they are today,\u201d Davidson says.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cHe gave me this pitch that Goldman is an incredible place, but you are a cog in a giant wheel,\u201d Davidson tells Entrepreneur<\/em> in a new interview. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s couch for a while as she searched for a place to live longer term.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nHow she got started<\/h2>\n
Seeing a broken system<\/h2>\n
Launching the product<\/h2>\n
Tactics for growth<\/h2>\n
Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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