Prolo raises £4.2M Seed to automate procurement for SME construction firms

Prolo, a London-based ConTech startup founded in 2024 by James Morris-Manuel, has raised £4.2 million (€4.9 million) in an oversubscribed Seed round led by Triple Point Ventures, with participation from Anamcara Capital, Concrete VC, Foundation Ventures, Haatch, Koro Capital, Love Ventures, and Portfolio Ventures — eight investors in total. The capital goes to sales and marketing scale-up and new product rollouts.

Morris-Manuel previously founded Virtual Walkthrough, a property visualisation platform acquired by Matterport, and served as EMEA Managing Director at Matterport before starting Prolo.

The friction in SME construction procurement

Procurement is one of the more inefficient processes in construction, particularly for smaller firms. Tier-1 contractors have dedicated procurement teams, long-term supplier frameworks, and volume leverage that gives them favourable pricing. SME contractors — working with fewer staff, faster-moving project schedules, and lower per-order volumes — typically manage procurement through phone calls, emails to individual suppliers, and verbal quotes with no audit trail.

Prolo's platform addresses this gap using a combination of LLMs, NLP, and voice transcription, accessible through channels contractors already use: WhatsApp messages, email, or phone. An SME contractor can request materials, equipment, or plant hire in the same way they would message a supplier — Prolo interprets the request, sources it, and processes the order. The platform offers trade pricing normally reserved for larger firms, plus up to 90 days' credit — a financing element that SME contractors typically cannot access from individual suppliers.

"For decades, SME contractors have been penalised by a lack of price transparency and inefficient ordering," Morris-Manuel said. "With Prolo, we are entirely shifting the dynamic of construction supply chains."

Oversubscribed, with eight investors

The oversubscription and eight-investor cap table is notable for a 2024-founded company's Seed round. It reflects genuine investor conviction, but also something worth flagging: an oversubscribed round at Seed typically signals both strong early traction and a competitive raise process. Neither Prolo nor any of the investors disclosed current revenue figures.

Sam Stone at Triple Point Ventures framed the investment thesis plainly: "Procurement remains one of the most manual and margin-sensitive parts of running a construction business, and Prolo has a huge opportunity to change that." The presence of Concrete VC — a fund specifically focused on construction technology — alongside general PropTech and early-stage investors suggests conviction that the construction supply chain is a viable venture category, not just a niche.

The investor mix also includes Haatch, Koro Capital, Love Ventures, and Portfolio Ventures — funds whose portfolio exposure spans fintech, B2B SaaS, and consumer tech as much as ConTech. That breadth makes the round read as much as a bet on Morris-Manuel's execution capability as on the specific product.

The 18-month proof points

Prolo needs to demonstrate two things over the next 18 months. First, that smaller construction firms actually change procurement behaviour when a frictionless alternative exists — behavioural change in construction is slower than in digital-native industries. Second, that the supplier-side relationships — which underpin the trade pricing and credit access — prove as durable as the technology layer.

The credit offering in particular introduces a financial exposure that a pure-software business would not carry. Whether that exposure is managed through supply-chain financing arrangements or sits on Prolo's balance sheet is not disclosed; it is the part of the proposition that merits closest attention as the company scales.