Why Vertical SaaS is Winning in Construction—Proven Metrics and Global Expansion

0:00The SaaS CFO Host: Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome Alastair Blenkin, CEO and founder at ProcurePro. Alastair, welcome to the show again.

0:07Alastair Blenkin: Again. Hey, Ben. How are you? Good to be back.

0:09The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, great to have you back. Always love repeat founders on this. That was a couple of years ago. But for first-time listeners here, tell us a little bit about your background.

0:19Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, absolutely. I used to be a lawyer for about five minutes before I decided there was more to life and got into tech and then tried to build an AI company probably before it was cool back in 2017. maybe a bit ahead of my time. And the first company got killed by COVID and we pivoted to found ProcurePro, which is procurement software for general contractors in the construction industry. So COVID baby and been going up into the right sense.

0:41The SaaS CFO Host: Oh, that's great to hear. That's great to hear. Yeah, obviously things are going well. Raised a couple of years ago. And now again, we'll get into that. But tell us, let's talk about ProcurePro. Tell us a little bit about the products and their services it offers.

0:53Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, absolutely. So we are procurement software for construction. So for those not as familiar with the construction industry, think all the data centers that have been built, the schools, the hospitals, every time you build one of these big$100,$200,$300 million buildings, you need 30, 40, 50 different subcontractors to do the concrete, the piling, the electricity, the landscaping. And the process to actually get those subcontractors on board is a bit of a dog's breakfast. So it's a sort of, as expected, tangle of spreadsheets around planning, tracking, going out and getting quotes, bringing them back in.

1:25Alastair Blenkin: But then that sort of tendering in Australian language or bidding in the US language, that process is pretty tried and tested from a software perspective. But procurement's more than that. It's actually vetting down, comparing these complex construction quotes, selecting them, managing your supply chain information, putting it into a contract and describing a really pretty meaty workflow that we've digitized, wrapped up all in one place and ultimately given construction, general contractors control at the most critical juncture, which is spending money through their supply chain. Like ironically, Ben, GCs, they don't actually build anything.

1:59Alastair Blenkin: They're just the middle managers of their subs who go and deliver on site.

2:03The SaaS CFO Host: And so it sounds like commercial construction for the most part?

2:10Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, commercial, but also infrastructure. So thinking building roads and tunnels and various different sorts of buildings, but all construction focused.

2:19The SaaS CFO Host: Okay, interesting. And so in this niche, I'm curious, do you get to see then kind of emerging trends? Like you mentioned data centers, a lot of data centers being built. So are you first to see where the money is going then?

2:33Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, look, it's talked a little bit. We characterize our journeys. We're through Act One and Act One never ends, but that's building workflow around a really critical control point. And Act Two is all about the intelligence layer that sits on top. As the world's obviously going crazy and rightfully with AI and a lot of SaaS companies maybe questioning their future in the world, being in vertical SaaS gives you an opportunity with proprietary data sets to be able to build on top of that. And ours, which is pricing data, as you pointed out, Ben, probably can't quite do it yet, but gives a year or two.

3:02Alastair Blenkin: and I reckon we should be able to see pricing move ahead of the whole market based on live cost data flowing through your system.

3:10The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, interesting. And tell us a little bit about your ideal customer. Are these mid to large global contractors? Tell us who you're after.

3:18Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, so general contractors, once you have about 20 staff or you manage through a full project, you start to need management systems. And so you've got this really like of all the different problems around this space of making your staff happier, driving productivity, getting... Ultimately, it's all about insight and control and really oversight through this critical risk of your business when you're spending so much money at pretty breakneck speed. So you start at about 20 odd staff, you start to need these systems. And we've got customers through the mid-market all the way up to enterprise.

3:49Alastair Blenkin: One of the investors in our latest round is Bouygues, who's a big French Fortune 500 company operating across 80 different geographies. They use us as a customer across a number of their different businesses and countries. And now they've come on board as an investor and everyone in between building stuff, building the world around us.

4:06The SaaS CFO Host: That must make you feel good. That's got to be a huge vote of confidence when a user, a big company says, hey, we'd like to put some money in too.

4:14Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, and make it all go faster. And that's, I think construction is this interesting space. I always describe it as one that you can't really walk in and common sense your way around, but construction people certainly get it. And then I think looking externally from a venture perspective, it's this massive industry. It's one of the top three biggest industries in the world. There's a huge amount of spend. There's a huge amount of fragmentation in terms of the different players within the industry. And there's a whole lot of manual work. And I came from this legal background where you think lawyers would never be the ones to change.

4:42Alastair Blenkin: And then AI comes along as really good at writing documents. And I really believe that construction's moment in the sun is not too far around the corner. There's so much data and there's so much pricing data in particular, which is really exciting.

4:55The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, that is. I love, yeah, we love more data. And one more question here. In customer geography, are your customers global? Are they local?

5:03Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, we've got this enterprise-wide product. So we had to work up through the ranks to get from your early innovators through your middle majority and then to the enterprise echelons. Started the business in Australia, hence the accent. I expanded myself to the UK, started 2024. before we expanded into the Middle East six months ago. And then we've got our eyes set on doing the regionalization for the US later this year as part of this funding round. So we've got global customers, obviously stronger in Australia, but I think the UK expansion really starting to hit our strides. Let's say about it.

5:32Alastair Blenkin: We've got 15 of the top 50 construction companies on board at varying stages of implementation in the UK within a couple of years. So just got to convert that all to enterprise wide and really capture the market.

5:45The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, great to hear that. And then what year did you found the company?

5:49Alastair Blenkin: So I found it in 2020. Probably spent a good year and a half building the biggest MVP ever because it's a big, bitter, meaty, enterprise workflow. And then, yeah, I've been growing quickly, but efficiently since then.

6:02The SaaS CFO Host: Okay. And then, Leah, let's talk about growing and let's talk about your fundraising journey. So you raised maybe a couple, three years ago, but tell us, it looks like you had a recent round. So how much did you raise recently?

6:13Alastair Blenkin: Yeah. So on the journey, we've done three rounds. The first one was angels, basically construction, our customers and folks in construction tech. The second one was led by Airtree, who's one of Australia's big three VCs, invested in the lives of Canva and nine other unicorns, as well as the founders of Aconnex. So construction tech success story acquired by Oracle for 1.2 billion US. And then the latest round was 7 million US, led by QIC, who's the Queensland Investment Corporation, the sovereign wealth fund of my home state. but they're a major infrastructure owner. So the asset owners are strategically valuable there.

6:49Alastair Blenkin: They're a major LP in a lot of the big US funds and sort of the round dynamic then allowed us to bring this group of strategics together really before what's probably a bigger growth round coming at the next juncture.

7:01The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, and so with this latest round, so 11 million USD with the latest, so what drove that? Why raise that next 11 billion?

7:10Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, look, I think where we had optionality, in terms of our future, which is nice. We're ridiculously efficient in terms of some of our SaaS metrics, which Ben, your content's been amazing to learn from since the earliest days and helped me put some pretty great dashboards together going way back when so I can really have the telemetry on your business, but super efficient in terms of LTV to CACs, like 40 plus payback periods, six to eight months on average, gross margins of 85 % odd. And so really it was about acceleration. There's a lot of product to build in vertical SaaS. You probably invest a little bit less in sales and marketing, but more heavily in product because your reputation goes quite quickly in those smaller logo-constrained industries.

7:53Alastair Blenkin: Part of the strategy. And so having really felt like we've worked out product and customer success, like we've got 98 % logo retention, 110 to 115 % NRR. It's going, how do we scale across multiple geos basically at the same time? really hit the gas on growth and also still deliver on the product stuff moving up market and

8:13The SaaS CFO Host: making your ai bets at the same time interesting so we have a lot of stats metrics i'm curious to provide some context around those metrics would you say like your acv your contract size would be like a mid-market enterprise type contract yeah mid-market i'd say on average you could get

8:28Alastair Blenkin: your unders and overs i think at the enterprise level though we've got line of sight at million plus ARR contracts, but on average, it's 50k ACDA at the moment.

8:37The SaaS CFO Host: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So it sounds like you found a nice formula because those are some great metrics. And then, like you said, it's about accelerating and expanding the geos. And then eventually sounds like coming into the US.

8:48Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, exactly. And so US is like slightly different, but not too different. So there's probably three months worth of bit of language stuff to do. And I've been on the phone kind of midnight last night, the night before with USGCs who So confirming what we think we know and also pretty pumped about some of the opportunity and validated. It's a similar gap in the market.

9:06The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, I love it. Global expansion continues. And so tell us, you've had a couple rounds, so we're Angel, then two rounds after that. What's top of mind? Any fundraising lesson learned or pain points or aha moments that you'd like to share with the founder community?

9:20Alastair Blenkin: oh i think the last one i did i think we my sort of mental soundbite for that was 98 percent of the works in the preparation like prepare really well more than you think and just get everything done like v 150 on your deck like all your faqs ready to go and then just like absolutely hammer the pipe and the the investors only see the time when you go to market but you've been out at for kind of months in advance i think probably some of the harder lessons learned on this fundraise was like around thinking about your timing. I got married in November, so I couldn't open around before then. And so we opened around in December, which naturally is running into the end of the year.

9:55Alastair Blenkin: So it dragged out a little bit, opening something that dragged over the new year, which was a little bit of an elongated process compared to what we'd managed to achieve previously. But it's also not just timing in terms of when you open stuff up, but almost like looking ahead and going, what are my numbers going to be like a month or two into the raise period and really optimizing around when your business looks the most attractive was probably the key lesson learned.

10:21The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, that's interesting. And obviously preparation is key, right? Timing. But I think, trying to think of others have mentioned that, but you mentioned hammer the pipe, which I assume means as you go into this raise, have a nice accelerating pipeline, pipeline that's building, you know, to show those investors that you've got some nice velocity.

10:41Alastair Blenkin: Oh, I was referring to the pipe of investors and obviously - push through but momentum during the raise certainly helps and then it's that's just the give and take around what deal are you trying to do really some sometimes there were things that dropped when we came through that helped and ultimately you present a set of numbers which then keeps if it keeps going up through the rate changes the commercial dynamic as you go yeah

11:05The SaaS CFO Host: yeah it makes sense yeah you'd love to time it yeah as your pipeline is increasing but tell us so going after general contractors and some of these 20 staff and above mid market to global tell us a little bit about your go-to-market motion how you're reaching these general contractors

11:18Alastair Blenkin: yeah very sales-led at them which is pretty typical from a construction perspective people people pick up the phone because they're getting called by lots of different people lots of different subbies so you can it's where business gets done and but ultimately it's how do we transition to something that's balanced with marketing and then we've built a second AI native product which is basically a PLG quote comparison tool so take complex 20 30 page construction quotes and all sorts of different formats throw them into the ai machine come back basically leveled to 90 accurate so that's really what we're launching and launching at the moment that's the trojan horse into companies so how do you accelerate sales velocity into what has been a bit of a traditionally slightly slower market to adopt and ultimately how do you get into the enterprise before people really work it out interesting and what would your take beyond

12:10The SaaS CFO Host: We have this whole debate, right, the SaaS apocalypse and different things. If your legacy SaaS and now evolving your product line to have some AI infused or is it ripe for agentic AI, things like that. So tell us a little bit about your philosophy, because like you said, you're doing AI before is cool. Like most of us, like most of us who didn't know what was going on prior. But tell us a little bit about how you're thinking about how AI is shaping your roadmap.

12:38Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, look, it's interesting. I think it really varies based on what type of business you are. I think if you're horizontal SaaS, you're potentially really exposed. But is someone going to spend hundreds of dollars of credits to save on a$20 a month license fee? There's more exposure there than, say, a vertical SaaS business where we are, where you're sitting on top of proprietary data. And it's also when you're looking at construction pricing information. I look at this like it's you're not looking for an AI a generative solution to generate a non-deterministic outcome so people want confidence in the numbers I think the hype particularly centered out of Silicon Valley is real that it's AI is amazing and I'm absolutely one of the people who's drinking the Kool-Aid and like a thousand percent for it but at the same time you look at businesses that are not take businesses and you work out what's the capability of those sort of businesses to transform and transform quickly?

13:35Alastair Blenkin: And does everyone just go and throw their whole tech stack out and replace it with Claude? I don't think so. I think software still exists and AI becomes table stakes. And so if your software doesn't have AI threaded throughout the experience within a couple of years time, truly and genuinely, you might not have too much of a future. What that looks like for us, I categorize it as a few different things. There's a smaller PLG product, which is almost solve a really painful problem, which that might get commoditized in time. But ultimately, when you connect that to workflow, it becomes even more powerful.

14:05Alastair Blenkin: There's unlock the power in the data in particular from a pricing and supply chain intelligence perspective, which is where we have a real competitive advantage. And then there's basically agentic workflows. So the typical stuff, what can we detect in the data? So for construction, risk is massive. It's 20 times more important than productivity gains because they can lose just money, the click of their fingers. So it's how can we detect risk, suggest an expert task, but ultimately move the needle around costs, both upside and downside. I think the metaphor I say to people from outside the construction industry, Ben, is you walk down the road, you don't ask three different people what a bottle of milk costs.

14:48Alastair Blenkin: you just know but the construction industry goes out to market and goes subcontractor a b and c what are you going to charge us for this service and i believe in a future where you've got such good structure around your cost data that you can be more programmatic in how construction is pricing which isn't just downstream procurement it's upstream like actually estimating what these projects cost and then construction people might look at you and say no there's too many if buts and maybes that won't exist but if you told me you could write a hundred page book report in two minutes, three years ago, I wouldn't have believed you either.

15:17The SaaS CFO Host: Yes. Yeah, no, interesting. Appreciate that insight, which leads us to the next big debate with Insassin AI's pricing models as those change from seat-based to whatever it might be, hybrid, outcome, agentic. So tell us a little bit about your pricing structure today.

15:33Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, we've not, certainly not by our design, but we've been pretty fortunate to be a bit insulated from some of that pricing uncertainty and fear of software companies. Construction is a very collaborative industry by nature. And so some of the pioneers like AconX and Procore, big leaders in the space, pioneered this pricing model, which was pinned to construction value, which is very polarizing for the industry. But it's basically a proxy for value. Basically, the more construction you do times by percentage, that equals a price. And as a result, you have a single number where you're not rate limited in terms of projects and users.

16:07Alastair Blenkin: Because there's so many people in the construction industry. it's a very collaborative need for software. You don't want to block and disincentivize use. And so as a result, we're effectively already insulated by having that value metric driving price with a few guardrails around it. As a mechanism to go ahead, we're not going to get seed erosion. Some SaaS companies are having the come to Jesus kind of moment around that contraction.

16:31The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so just say Stripe takes a percent of the revenue flowing through their platform that you're seeing construction value, there's some percent that you charge based on that value.

16:41Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, that's typically how it works. And you can put a few like guardrails around a project volume and package volume, that sort of stuff. But it all kind of boils back to the same thing, which is how much construction are you doing?

16:52The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Makes sense. And then now, so about six years in, do you have a favorite number of metric that you're focused on right now to guide the business? You mentioned several important metrics before, but are there things top of mind that you like to look at on a monthly basis or weekly basis?

17:08Alastair Blenkin: ARR growth. And that's probably just the one I've looked at in a few different lenses, but I look at 12 months trailing and that's really of all the efficiency metrics, which is where our business is really strong. And to give you some numbers, we're now over 10 mil ARR, we basically, these are Aussie numbers, but in our last round, we burnt four and added nine mil of ARR, which is like over two to one ratio of ARR to capital burn, which is unheard of. But then ultimately, it's how do we do that quicker in a logo-constrained market? The flip side is you've got no churn and it's a market where you're not just going to win 5%.

17:49Alastair Blenkin: You can genuinely, like in Australia, we've got 50 % of the market and we believe you can get, call it 90%. Market penetration is viable in these winner take most or one or two take most. But ultimately, like right now, given some of the strengths of the business, it's all about now nailing growth.

18:06The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, which looks like a lot of girls since we last talked looking back at the notes, which is great to see. And then what's your current team size?

18:13Alastair Blenkin: We're at 90 globally, and we'll probably be about 130 in the next 12 to 18 months. And that's probably, I'd say, just org chart and ownership expansion. And then ideally, there's kind of some flatlining around, not scaling through headcount, given how the world's changing with AI, but at the same time, when you're operating basically four distinct continents you need some some teams and some ownership structure in place yeah i can't

18:39The SaaS CFO Host: have the agentic ai unit operating in some country need to need a real person there for now but so it looks like about double the headcounts as we last spoke and yeah tell us thinking about internal ai use what is your philosophy right now with hiring a person versus can ai software do that

18:59Alastair Blenkin: yeah look we've got some really great use cases it's really like completely embedded in the engineering team like step changing productivity which is great when you've got a larger code base as well there's always you read the blog posts around going like how ridiculous is it when you have a larger code base there's stuff to contend with and there's complexity compared to yeah i'm gonna just go and code something brand new over the weekend there's good stuff happening there but like with some work to modularize and really make things effective on the commercial side of business so there's a whole lot of investment being put into the gtm side which is backing through we've got supports like running really well internal tooling around like product questions it's don't ask a person ask them ask the julius in slack and there's lots of there's lots of it's a great use cases within that and ultimately it's going the whole business runs on cord everyone's got access to it but for me it's now about having focus and probably standards of excellence within the business around how do we not just give everyone access and have their own use cases, but how do you not have 50 different agents, but do five well and then 10 well and have that real drive from a core team.

20:05The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, interesting. And then one last question around internal AI. Of course, we've seen all these stories about token maxing and just using a lot of credits internally. And since it's kind of your official go-to tool internally, have you set budgets? Are you not there yet where you don't have to be concerned with internally I spend.

20:22Alastair Blenkin: We're not too concerned about it. If my people like blow our budgets, I'm all for it. We're not spending like heaps. I think just kind of the nature of our business. It's like this, it's nothing to be too concerned about it. I do get frustrated sometimes, you know, when you get maxed out and it says wait five hours till you reset. And then I just flip over to Gemini or chat GPT or you're running like four, four different systems all at the same time. And obviously like working through the different models and optimizing it to work for you. and that it's ultimately how you make yourself more and more productive and more and more scalable.

20:53The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, interesting. I think it'll be an interesting budget season coming up this fall as CFOs have to contend with all the ask for internally I spend and token spend.

21:02Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, and you want to be mindful of it, but I also find it crazy that I've always been just absolutely going hard at software. Anything that we can find software for, absolutely buy it. Not concerned about that. I'd like, we basically always say software, not salaries, both internally and externally. It's a whole lot cheaper than people, even if you get a scary AI bill at some point in time. I also find it really ironic from a customer perspective. You're selling to construction can be this kind of risk-averse industry. And if someone's worried about spending a bit on software, but then at the same time, they're making mistakes on their job site and they're bleeding money.

21:37Alastair Blenkin: It's like an ironic exposition of risk aversion that you're risk-averse to make a decision there, but you've got risk in your business that's costing you money. And so I think about in a similar way to our own business that it's that optimization of control versus speed. And even though you might see a big number, like how much money you're actually really losing compared to, say, people in your business getting blocked on cloud productivity because you haven't given them enough budget.

22:02The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, appreciate that perspective. Yeah, a lot of debate right now about internal AI spend. So we'll see how the budget season shakes out this fall. But sounds like things are growing great. one more question before we wrap today because it looks like you're a double the head cow maybe four at four to five x the they are since we last spoke but what's top of mind for you we're about halfway through 2026 what's top of mind for you for the rest of the year oh q2 end of that in in

22:27Alastair Blenkin: 21 days so just laser focus on the end of the quarter look i think for me it's really like where it's the soundbite of going from founder to ceo all structure kind of gaps in that getting the right people building that kind of next layer of ownership from a we've had a leadership team which is multi-geo and so therefore you've had it quite larger and it's really about that next layer up really empowering them and making sure that i got clarity across the business and then really how fast can we run so that's still a that's still a work in progress to build that operating rhythm for the company but ultimately it's going how can we set ourselves up to build some really cool stuff scale across multiple GIs and do it all yesterday.

23:09The SaaS CFO Host: Yeah, always yesterday. And one more question before we wrap, and you mentioned the founder to CEO transition. So is there a point for you as a founder where you realize, boy, I've got to stop acting like a founder and more as a manager? Is it a slow progression? Is it something that hits you in the face? Tell us, because that's really interesting. Tell us your founder to CEO transition.

23:31Alastair Blenkin: It's interesting as a founder, you just like whack them all in a sense It's your default reaction is you see a problem, you hit a problem, and you deal with that type stuff. And it's almost been the forcing your default response when it's going, hey, this one area of the business, this one department, either that's weaker, they're struggling, I can lean in and help and give opinions. And I'm not a, like, I slay it more towards the founder mode side of things. And it's not like, hey, here's a goal, have autonomy, like completely off you go. I want to be across the details and help shape that and ultimately raise standards.

24:05Alastair Blenkin: It's going, that's not good enough, lift it up, challenge us to be great. But ultimately, you realize some of that behavior creates problems around going, not if you don't give space, but it's going, if things are problematic, do I need to go in and fix them? Or it's like, why are they problematic and kind of taking a step back for it and making sure that we've got enough ownership, I think is a big thing. We've had maybe some problems around whether it's leveling up the team and getting extra experience, which gaps in the org chart, or multiple people owning certain things and kind of the founder being in the ops or the office of the CEO department, almost like catching a lot of balls and plugging some gaps.

24:44Alastair Blenkin: And you take a step back for that and realize, hey, you're really trying to design an org chart and give clarity. one of the one of our investors who's one of the founders of clipchamp got bought by microsoft a few years ago they do video software which is now on the office 365 suite but said to someone to me 12 months ago which is going you realize how much more important people and culture becomes less around the fluffy almost side of it but say the clarity and the alignment side of things if you go and have a five percent lift across 100 people which then becomes 130 people in 12 months that's a really significant impact.

25:20Alastair Blenkin: And so it makes you think about your own time as having leverage. And ultimately, for me to stop being operational, and really the biggest points of leverage I have is how I can communicate both internally and externally to our business and to our customers. So that's the ambition where we get to. And obviously, there's a bunch of stepping stones and work in between.

25:38The SaaS CFO Host: Sounds like whatever you're doing internally is working. Sounds like great success so far in the last couple of years, at least. So I really appreciate you coming on the show, updating your journey of where you stand today. If listeners would like to learn more about ProcurePro, where should we send them online?

25:53Alastair Blenkin: ProcurePro.co, that's C-O, not dot com. And Ben, I just want to say thank you. I just alluded to it earlier, but when I was right back at the start of my second cut, basically the post pivot, but found a journey once we actually felt that real pull of product market fit and I was working out how do we do this SaaS metric stuff and literally going through just spending hours and hours reading your blog posts and working out that actually it all comes back to the chart of accounts and here's how you do it. And then some of the outcomes of that was certainly reception from the VC community as well.

26:23Alastair Blenkin: You've got a handle on your metrics just ahead of your peers in terms of stage of business. A lot of that is thanks to the content you put out, Ben. So I'm happy to be able to share the mic and contribute to what you're putting out there for the tech industry, which has really helped me and I'm sure helps thousands of other founders.

26:38The SaaS CFO Host: I appreciate that. I appreciate that feedback. So I'm glad it helped, which is the whole point. Yeah, thank you. So Alistair, yeah, thanks for coming on the show. again hopefully have you on in another year or so check in see what's going on but sounds like great success go and keep that going and again thanks for coming on the show today thanks ben thanks