CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Purchasing Platform, an innovative spend management, analytics, and B2B online marketplace that is reinventing procurement for the manufactured housing industry, today announced that it raised $3.5 million in Series A funding. The investment was led by Method Capital with participation from Participate Capital, Old Town Capital, and other strategic investors.
Purchasing Platform provides millions of industry-relevant products and supplies from more than 50 leading vendors at negotiated prices reflecting an aggregate demand from more than 2,000 manufactured housing communities across the U.S. In addition to significant cost savings, clients benefit from product standardization across a portfolio, a customizable spend-approval process, productivity improvements from reduced travel to stores, and detailed spend analytics.
Currently, many property management teams within the real estate industry lack efficient purchasing processes. Property managers and maintenance personnel are burdened with time-consuming tasks such as searching for the lowest pricing, negotiating bids with multiple vendors, and buying products through a variety of disparate channels. At the same time, corporate supervisors lack an efficient tool for tracking, controlling, and standardizing employee spend, while monitoring vendor compliance. Purchasing Platform solves these problems with a new approach: directly managing a broad array of pertinent vendor relationships and streamlining procurement with a consolidated B2B marketplace. This enables real estate portfolios of all sizes to dramatically improve productivity, streamline vendor payment through one channel, improve accounting processes, and maximize savings.
“By providing an easy-to-use, fully customizable marketplace that supports the specific needs of our manufactured housing customers as well as their preferred local, regional, and national vendors, we have quickly become a ‘one-stop shop’ for the industry to rely on,” said Dave Bowen, CEO of Purchasing Platform. “The network effect we’ve experienced in the form of referrals from clients and vendors alike demonstrates both the demand for our solution and the opportunity to transform procurement for the industry. In doing so, we also help our clients improve the tenant experience and overall quality of every participating community.”
With the funding, Purchasing Platform plans to grow the reach of its first-to-market solution across the manufactured housing sector, as well as broaden its footprint in tangential industries such as multifamily, student housing, single family, senior living, self-storage, and other commercial real estate sectors. The company also plans to expand its investment in technology development to deliver customer-driven functionality within its proprietary platform. The raise will also enable the business to continue to add professionals to a number of integrated teams that support client activity such as customer success, order success, merchandising, account management, marketing, and tactical buying.
“Our own research indicates that the average property maintenance staff spends an average of two working days per month driving back and forth to local stores,” said Lon Chow, partner at Method Capital. “We believe Purchasing Platform’s technology and knowledge of the real estate sector will pay immediate dividends for property owners and we are excited to help drive the company’s next phase of growth.”
This capital raise comes on the heels of several other successes for Purchasing Platform. In August 2019, the company, which has experienced 363% three-year growth, was named to the prestigious Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies. In Q3 2019, Purchasing Platform added approximately 500 manufactured housing communities to its client roster.
About Purchasing Platform
Purchasing Platform is an innovative spend management, analytics, and B2B online marketplace that is reinventing procurement for the manufactured housing industry. Purchasing Platform drastically increases user productivity by reducing the time spent offsite at stores, driving compliance to portfolio-driven standardized products, and eliminating wasted effort around order fulfillment via its multiple tiers of support services. To learn more, visit purchasingplatform.com or follow @PurchPlatform.
