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Key Takeaways Kojo is the largest construction materials procurement platform in the U.S.
Its founder, Maria Davidson, was an outsider to construction when she decided to create the company.
Davidson relied on conversations she had with “thousands” of construction workers about pain points in the industry to create Kojo.
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.
“He gave me this pitch that Goldman is an incredible place, but you are a cog in a giant wheel,” Davidson tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “There 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.”
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’s couch for a while as she searched for a place to live longer term.
Maria Davidson. Credit: Kojo
Working with Lonsdale at 8VC exposed her to “big, traditionally unsexy industries” 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.
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.
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