“If I’d had this 20 years ago…”: How One Founder Is Modernizing Construction Procurement
Slice of Construction Team
07/29/2025
Field Materials didn’t just impress investors. It made Eldar Sadikov’s dad jealous. That was the moment Sadikov knew he was onto something. A seasoned entrepreneur with a PhD track record in AI, Sadikov had already built and sold a company to PayPal. But Field Materials, his current venture, is different. It hits closer to home.
His father, a longtime general contractor, didn’t need buzzwords to get it. “Wow,” he said after seeing the platform. “If I had this when I was building my construction business, it would’ve been transformational.” That kind of validation isn’t just rare. It’s deeply personal.
What Field Materials Actually Does
Field Materials is a procurement platform purpose built for the construction industry. It helps contractors manage everything from quotes and orders to delivery tickets and invoices, all in one place. The secret sauce? Smart AI that reads and digitizes messy, paper based construction documents so no one has to manually input line items ever again.
From Stanford Labs to Job Sites
Sadikov’s journey started far from construction sites. With a computer science degree, a machine learning PhD stint at Stanford, and a startup exit under his belt, he was solidly in the tech world. But when an old Stanford friend from the civil engineering side pitched him on the broken state of procurement in construction, something clicked.
Sadikov knew the pain points firsthand. His mother had spent her life as a CFO in construction. His dad ran a contracting business. “I didn’t seek advice from my parents on business,” he said, “but this was the first time they could really relate to what I was building”.
Why Contractors Actually Use It
Procurement in construction is notoriously messy. Most systems are still manual, decentralized, and error prone. Contractors juggle quotes, slips, and invoices, often in PDFs or faxes.
Field Materials doesn’t just digitize that chaos. It understands it. The AI can read vendor quotes, delivery tickets, and hauling slips, then feed the data directly into accounting software. No retyping. No mismatches. No missed items.
And the impact? Word of mouth. “This is what customers show their buddies,” Sadikov said. “They’re like, ‘Look at this. This is cool.’” That organic buzz is what kicked off Field Materials’ recent growth spurt.
A Real-Life Growth Curve
The team launched in mid 2023 and has doubled order volume every quarter since. They’re now processing over $400 million in annualized procurement volume and it’s still early innings. When they went to raise a Series A, they were 30% oversubscribed within weeks.
Not bad for a vertical software startup in a “hard” industry that once got passed over by top tier VCs. “When Andreessen Horowitz said no, it felt like the world collapsed,” Sadikov admitted. But looking back now? “With traction, everything changes. You have to stay the course”.
Who Field Materials Helps
Right now, contractors across nine trades from drywall to mechanical use the platform. Each trade brings its own quirks, but they all share the same need: make procurement suck less. Field Materials is especially valuable for mid sized contractors who lack dedicated procurement teams but still deal with complex, high volume purchasing.
The Road Ahead
The current platform spans five modules: quotes, orders, invoices, inventory, and receipts. But Sadikov says they’re only in the third inning. They plan to build at least five more modules over the next two years, all driven by customer demand.
Behind the scenes, they’re also obsessing over accuracy. “Any procurement doc you can imagine in construction, we want to be number one in reading it correctly,” he said. That focus on best in class AI is where much of their Series A capital is going.
The Bottom Line
Field Materials isn’t just another B2B SaaS play. It’s a homecoming for a founder whose family lived the problems he’s now solving with software. And for the contractors using it, it’s not just cool tech. It’s a better way to do business.
