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Why we invested in Canibuild
Every now and then but not often, you’re lucky enough to find a software business that is rapidly changing the way an enormous industry operates. That is what we found in Canibuild – and why we are excited to have led their Series A capital raise of $8m.
Canibuild provides software to builders. The platform allows these builders to design structures live, in real time, alongside anxious property owners. By ingesting an absolutely colossal amount of data from a plethora of sources, the platform gives the answer to the age-old question: what can I build here?
Without Canibuild, this process would usually look like weeks of site visits, measurements, analysing government planning regulations, drawings and offline collaboration between builders and their customers. Ultimately, this would culminate in a plan and a quote for goods and services which aligns with permissible planning requirements. Put simply, it's a bad process and a property owner should be able to know, 'what can I build?' in minutes. With Canibuild, this is now a reality.
Unlike the many other design solutions out there, Canibuild isn’t designed for use by an architect or designer that then delivers a PDF to a customer. It is uniquely built for multiple other stakeholders within a building company to be able to engage alongside a client in real time on screen with a client. Using the solution, sales teams drag, drop and manipulate drawings in real time. Once your swimming pool, granny flat or new home is designed and positioned in the right manner relative to trees, walls, neighbours, state and federal planning laws and many other factors, a quote is provided then and there. It includes every brick and kg of concrete needed for your custom build. You can now build.
Canibuild is led by Timothy Cocaro who previously built Rescon, a successful building company in the granny flat sector and the first client of Canibuild. It is possible that he understands the problem he is solving better than any other founder I have met and he has used his understanding of the industry to build one of the fastest growing software companies I have ever seen.
He has done this using a sales and marketing team of… zero. This is well and truly a solution that is selling itself with a call to market so strong that keeping up with demand is the greatest challenge they face – this is before even talking about building scalable go-to-market functions, the first thing we will do after our investment. To date their customer list already encompasses some of Australia’s largest builders including Metricon, GJ Gardner, McDonald Jones, Narellan Pools, Ranbuild, SnapADU and Mightybuildings to name a few.
In the case of Canibuild, it is hard to find a fault. No doubt the journey scaling from founder led to scalable company will meet speed bumps but as it stands, the quantitative metrics underpinning our decision to invest are demonstrative of a solution being pulled into a market in dire need of a solution:
- Time from launch to $1m ARR: 12 months
- Time from $1m - $3m ARR: 7 months
- LTV:CAC: > 5
- Churn: < 1% pm
- Net Revenue Retention: > 105%
- Cash Burn: c. 100K pm
- Marketing spend in the first 12 months: c. $500 pm (no there are no zeros missing here)
- Rule of 40: so high you won’t believe me
… it goes on
In essence what you have here are best in class economics within a business that is yet to be optimised. These economics were achieved by a deep industry expert that hasn’t previously built and led go-to-market functions within SaaS companies. They have been achieved purely based on building something customers need and love and with the right resourcing, you can expect exceptional things from here.
Beyond these strong fundamentals however, there’s an even bigger vision. Today, Canibuild has detailed information on most key builders in Australia, including the inputs related to all assets they routinely build and an in-depth understanding of every vacant lot and subdivision they own. Put simply, we know which vacant lots in Australia are available for purchase, what can be built there, who can build it and how much it costs to build. Beyond this, we are able to serve that information up to home buyers allowing consumers to browse both land and homes contextually within a digital environment. It’s easy to see the potential to drive outcomes and transparency for the enormous home builders' market from there, a market which is critically underserved by the REA and Domain duopoly almost exclusively servicing the built home market.
For now, we will work to transition from founder-led heroics towards scalability and look to execute on the ‘big vision’. This raise is all about scale, repeatability and optimisation, and to achieve this we will quadruple the team in the next 12 months. There’s work to be done but the case for Canibuild is relatively simple. Best in class metrics and economics behind a B2B business model and a vision beyond that that will change the way we purchase house and land packages. This company is going to be a unicorn.
Why we invested in Canibuild
Every now and then but not often, you’re lucky enough to find a software business that is rapidly changing the way an enormous industry operates. That is what we found in Canibuild – and why we are excited to have led their Series A capital raise of $8m.
Canibuild provides software to builders. The platform allows these builders to design structures live, in real time, alongside anxious property owners. By ingesting an absolutely colossal amount of data from a plethora of sources, the platform gives the answer to the age-old question: what can I build here?
Without Canibuild, this process would usually look like weeks of site visits, measurements, analysing government planning regulations, drawings and offline collaboration between builders and their customers. Ultimately, this would culminate in a plan and a quote for goods and services which aligns with permissible planning requirements. Put simply, it's a bad process and a property owner should be able to know, 'what can I build?' in minutes. With Canibuild, this is now a reality.
Unlike the many other design solutions out there, Canibuild isn’t designed for use by an architect or designer that then delivers a PDF to a customer. It is uniquely built for multiple other stakeholders within a building company to be able to engage alongside a client in real time on screen with a client. Using the solution, sales teams drag, drop and manipulate drawings in real time. Once your swimming pool, granny flat or new home is designed and positioned in the right manner relative to trees, walls, neighbours, state and federal planning laws and many other factors, a quote is provided then and there. It includes every brick and kg of concrete needed for your custom build. You can now build.
Canibuild is led by Timothy Cocaro who previously built Rescon, a successful building company in the granny flat sector and the first client of Canibuild. It is possible that he understands the problem he is solving better than any other founder I have met and he has used his understanding of the industry to build one of the fastest growing software companies I have ever seen.
He has done this using a sales and marketing team of… zero. This is well and truly a solution that is selling itself with a call to market so strong that keeping up with demand is the greatest challenge they face – this is before even talking about building scalable go-to-market functions, the first thing we will do after our investment. To date their customer list already encompasses some of Australia’s largest builders including Metricon, GJ Gardner, McDonald Jones, Narellan Pools, Ranbuild, SnapADU and Mightybuildings to name a few.
In the case of Canibuild, it is hard to find a fault. No doubt the journey scaling from founder led to scalable company will meet speed bumps but as it stands, the quantitative metrics underpinning our decision to invest are demonstrative of a solution being pulled into a market in dire need of a solution:
- Time from launch to $1m ARR: 12 months
- Time from $1m - $3m ARR: 7 months
- LTV:CAC: > 5
- Churn: < 1% pm
- Net Revenue Retention: > 105%
- Cash Burn: c. 100K pm
- Marketing spend in the first 12 months: c. $500 pm (no there are no zeros missing here)
- Rule of 40: so high you won’t believe me
… it goes on
In essence what you have here are best in class economics within a business that is yet to be optimised. These economics were achieved by a deep industry expert that hasn’t previously built and led go-to-market functions within SaaS companies. They have been achieved purely based on building something customers need and love and with the right resourcing, you can expect exceptional things from here.
Beyond these strong fundamentals however, there’s an even bigger vision. Today, Canibuild has detailed information on most key builders in Australia, including the inputs related to all assets they routinely build and an in-depth understanding of every vacant lot and subdivision they own. Put simply, we know which vacant lots in Australia are available for purchase, what can be built there, who can build it and how much it costs to build. Beyond this, we are able to serve that information up to home buyers allowing consumers to browse both land and homes contextually within a digital environment. It’s easy to see the potential to drive outcomes and transparency for the enormous home builders' market from there, a market which is critically underserved by the REA and Domain duopoly almost exclusively servicing the built home market.
For now, we will work to transition from founder-led heroics towards scalability and look to execute on the ‘big vision’. This raise is all about scale, repeatability and optimisation, and to achieve this we will quadruple the team in the next 12 months. There’s work to be done but the case for Canibuild is relatively simple. Best in class metrics and economics behind a B2B business model and a vision beyond that that will change the way we purchase house and land packages. This company is going to be a unicorn.