Construction Management App Powerplay Raises $5.2 Mn Funding The startup aims to digitize India's massive construction industry, where the sector is expected to become the third largest globally by 2025 and grow by 7.1 per cent each year

Bengaluru-based construction management app Powerplay on Friday announced to have raised $5.2 million in funding led by Accel Partners and Surge, a scale-up program by Sequoia Capital India for startups in India and Southeast Asia. India Quotient and Snapdeal founders also participated in the round.

Powerplay is a free mobile app that connects multiple stakeholders involved in construction, enabling them to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. Project managers, workers, and partners can use this one-stop platform to help them track their progress, deliverables, and payments, as well as streamline the often complex and multi-stakeholder project management process.

"Powerplay comes at a time when the construction industry in India is ripe for digital disruption. By empowering construction workers and contractors with technology, we are driving the growth of crucial infrastructure required for economic and social progress in the country. We're committed to keep learning from our users, and will be dedicating the new funding into building a world-class team and product improvements to digitize the industry one step at a time," said Iesh Dixit, founder, and chief executive officer, Powerplay.

With the Powerplay app, contractors can not only chart their project completion progress but use it to track employee attendance, budgeting, and invoicing, as well as issues and material management. Powerplay is an operating system for all construction stakeholders (builders, contractors, and subcontractors) to build projects of all sizes, from tallest buildings to longest roads.

Powerplay is part of Surge's fifth cohort of 23 companies that have developed new digital solutions to help companies and individuals work, live, and learn better in a rapidly evolving Southeast Asian landscape, the platform shared.

The construction sector in India is the country's second-largest contributor to GDP, and currently employs 16 per cent of the working population. Yet, very few tech solutions have emerged to help digitize the construction process—a need that has been accelerated by the pandemic. Above that, the industry is dominated by small and medium contractors, who still rely on pen, paper, and WhatsApp to track progress and struggle to maintain visibility over the work of so many stakeholders involved. As a result, construction projects often face very costly delays when initial time and budget estimates go wrong.