Imagine how many parts it takes to build a rocket engine. Now imagine you ask for and compare quotes for all those parts, get approval to buy the parts you’ve chosen, and track those parts until they arrive at your headquarters. It’s more complicated than it sounds — but it doesn’t have to be, or so say two brothers who just won funding to update the procurement process for hardware companies.
Like many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated equipment in a cutting-edge industry. CEO Emir Sahamanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin, and Stoke Space. And at each, he faced the same problem: actually getting the parts he needed.
“I was continually frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview. “It really got to the point where I felt the thing holding hardware back was the software tooling that everybody was using. It was making everyone more inefficient.”
He, along with his brother, former Meta Software engineer Haris Sahamanovic, founded 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 described today’s hardware procurement process as confusing, overly complex and wasteful. At large firms, engineers are typically left out of the process — purchase requests are put into a “black box,” he said — but they are also typically unaware of purchase orders from other team members.
This quickly leads to problems: imagine Engineer A has to order a part, and they need to get it in time to match Engineer B’s schedule, so they pay $20,000 for expedited feed. But it turns out Engineer B’s part is going to be late. If they had known this, they could have saved both money and headaches.
Delays can also occur for other reasons. Engineers may not understand what to order, when, and from whom due to not having a clear picture of their team’s purchasing history or supplier capabilities.
“It’s a waste of the engineer’s time, it’s a waste of the supply chain team’s time, and it’s a waste of the company’s money,” Ameer said.
Many existing procurement tools are simply used to store data, but that’s not where any of the work happens: it happens in email chains, spreadsheets and PDFs. It’s not standardised. Forge’s system uses an AI model to analyse supplier feedback – whether it comes in a quote spreadsheet, text email or PDF – and integrates that information across its platform.
For this reason, companies don’t need to adopt a supplier to streamline forging, a hurdle that has hampered other standardization efforts. It’s a “huge core value prop,” Ameer said. “You can never get over it [suppliers] They are not ready to adopt it because they have 20 different customers. They are not going to learn 20 different tools for all 20 customers.”
Engineers can also create custom workflows based on the company’s needs, which is important for larger versus smaller firms. More than just order tracking, Forge’s software also includes intake request management, purchasing workflows, quote comparison, and automated onboarding of suppliers and performance tracking.
Forge already has paying customers, and the brothers plan to use the initial funding to attract more customers by improving the product and expanding their (two-person) team.
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