Speed Beats Price: What SubBase’s Order Data Reveals About Materials Buying in 2026

When Eric Helitzer first came on Bricks & Bytes, SubBase was a pre-seed startup digitizing how subcontractors buy materials. Three years later he returned with a $7 million Series A led by FINTOP Capital, with Fika Ventures participating, taking total funding past $15 million.

The detail Owen flagged before the interview even started: FINTOP is a fintech fund, not a ConTech one. That choice of lead investor says as much about where materials procurement is heading as anything in the pitch deck. And because SubBase now sits in the order flow between contractors and suppliers, Helitzer has a data feed on the materials economy that most of the industry would pay for.

Why a fintech fund led a ConTech round

The money is in the payment, not just the order

SubBase started as workflow software: field request to purchase order to delivery to invoice, all in one place instead of scattered emails, texts, and spreadsheets. But once you handle invoice reconciliation, Helitzer explained, the next problem is obvious. Suppliers wait too long to get paid, and contractors lack real-time visibility into what materials actually cost against budget. Moving payments faster, using the order and delivery data already flowing through the platform, is the natural expansion, and it’s exactly the thesis a fintech investor understands.

FINTOP’s playbook backs vertical systems of record that grow into financial infrastructure, with roughly 100 banks among its LPs. For the materials category, the signal matters: procurement software is graduating from admin tool to financial rail. It’s the same trajectory we mapped when we looked at the $600 billion of US materials spend still running on phone calls and Excel.

What the order data says about the economy

Inflation confirmed, and speed beating price

Asked what signals he sees in the platform’s data, Helitzer started with prices. Reports of materials climbing 8 to 10% “have never been more true,” he said; SubBase sees it across live orders. That squares with Associated Builders and Contractors’ analysis showing materials prices up nearly 10% year over year as of May 2026, driven by tariff-hit inputs like iron, steel, and copper.

The qualitative finding is more useful for anyone bidding work. In an inflationary market, the suppliers winning more orders aren’t the cheapest ones. They’re the fastest to respond. A slightly higher price with guaranteed delivery beats a discount on material stuck on back order, because a crew standing idle costs more than the price gap. “Vendors that are winning here are winning not just because of price, but because of first-action speed,” Helitzer said.

Volume tells its own story. The subcontractors and self-performing GCs on the platform are only getting busier, and larger GCs are increasingly self-performing work, particularly concrete, which pushes even more ordering through their own hands.

Three ways contractors actually buy materials

And why the phone call will never fully die

Helitzer’s map of the market has three buying models, and SubBase treats each differently. Centralized buyers, usually large enterprises, run everything through a purchasing organization and want automation plus leverage over their buying power. Semi-centralized firms let project managers order within an approval process, with the back office needing aggregated visibility. Then there’s fully decentralized buying: a superintendent picks up the phone, the bill gets paid whenever, and cost coding happens weeks later, if the code is even right.

That third bucket is the hardest nut, and Helitzer is realistic about it. “There’s always going to be people picking up the phone. That’s not going to change.” The play isn’t forcing new habits; it’s ingesting the phone-call chaos into a layer that adds visibility without adding work. Asked whether the whole industry ends up buying through platforms, his answer was a firm no, followed by a description of how to win anyway.

The two-sided, trade-specific bet

Building for the outside sales rep, not just the sub

What Helitzer thinks separates SubBase from adjacent tools is the supplier side. Materials buying runs on relationships that predate software, usually through an outside sales rep juggling fragmented emails, texts, and calls, then manually rekeying everything into systems that often lack any API. SubBase built tooling for that rep first, on the logic that faster reps mean better service, and better service is how distributors selling the same commodity differentiate. Deeper integrations into those aging supplier systems are a big part of what the new funding pays for.

The commercial model reflects how buying actually works. SubBase charges subcontractors a platform subscription tiered on projected purchase volume rather than per seat, because a single box of nails can touch six people across both sides of a transaction and per-seat pricing punishes exactly the collaboration the system needs. For a sense of how this category has consolidated before, our weekly ConTech funding coverage keeps tracking procurement raises from Japan to Saudi Arabia; the category is anything but quiet.

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