Short answer: Eldar Sadikov says he founded Field Materials in January 2022 to automate manual purchasing and invoice work, reading supplier documents and integrating with ERPs. It launched in 2023, grew about 7x, then 3x last year.
Watch this answer from Episode 33 (starts at 4:48) · Episode 33 notes and transcript
From Episode 33: AI Is Transforming Construction — We’re Entering a Golden Era, starting at 4:48.
Jordan Metzner [4:48]: Awesome. Let's let's kind of jump into that, if you don't mind, Eldar. Just tell us a little bit about, how did the company start? How did you guys get into the space? And I mean, it seems like AI is so critical to how your company operates, but, did you guys exist before AI, and how has AI kind of allowed you to build what you guys are building?
Eldar Sadikov [5:05]: No. That's that's yeah. I mean, we started in 2022, same year when ChatGPT came out. We started in January, and ChatGPT came out towards the end of the year. The idea for the company I've I've been operating in AI for a long time, so I went to Stanford for my grad school, and then I founded my first company in 2011, which was AI company for retail. This is my second company, and when we founded Field Materials, the basic idea was very simple. The basic idea was, hey, know, commercial contractors buy lots and lots of materials, it's a very manual process, know, you have to you know, get quotes from the suppliers, you have to enter purchase orders, create the purchase orders, a lot of times doing manual data entry. The materials get shipped to the job site or to the warehouse, somebody has to check what has been received, what's still outstanding, what's back ordered. Then the invoices come in, has to verify those invoices, enter those invoices into the account and software, very you know, very verify their validity and make sure that we you received all the materials. A lot of manual work sort of from, purchasing staff, accounts payable staff, project managers.
Eldar Sadikov [6:12]: And the basic idea was that, and can we automate some of these workflows? And coincidentally, the same year that we founded the company, AI really made a center stage appearance, and we realized in early twenty three that so much of this could be automated because of the fact that we can read the information from the documents themselves, whether it's a quote document that you get from a supplier or you get a delivery ticket, when you the material gets shipped to you or the invoice, so much of that information could be read. And then by doing direct tight integrations with the underlying ERPs, we can automate a lot of the workflows and the data entry. And that's sort of like what laid out the product and really shaped the product, and we launched the product in the 2023, and it really took off, in the past two years we've grown, three x last year, more than, about seven x the previous year, and really hit it, humming on all cylinders.
