The big winner at last month’s AccelerateOTT pitchfest was Ottawa-based GoFor – the markers of an on-demand delivery app for the construction industry – which took home a grand-prize $500,000 investment after organizers revealed a last-minute boost in funding.
Techopia Live brought CEO Brad Rollo on the show this week to learn how the firm is ramping up plans to expand its construction industry marketplace south of the border.
Before entering the startup scene, Rollo ran a construction company of his own. Though he often ran day-to-day activities on a site, he also found he was usually the one stuck running back and forth to grab extra materials from his suppliers – a go-fer, as it’s called.
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He found this to be a common complaint amongst his peers, and one that had a clear trade-off: the less time you’re spending on the site, the less you can do to move the project along.
“This is a productivity issue. If you don’t solve it quickly, you are losing money. It’s quite simple,” Rollo told Techopia Live.
His entrepreneurial drive led him to found GoFor, a marketplace that simplifies on-demand material delivery for the construction industry. With a fleet of independent drivers, GoFor connects suppliers to their customers to facilitate shipments when they’re needed.
The company broke out in Canada a couple years ago and has since started entering cities in the U.S.
“We’re very aggressive in our growth,” Rollo said.
With the fresh funding from Montreal’s Panache Ventures and the local Capital Angel Network, the company is now able to “keep its head down” and work on expanding to more U.S. cities, with the Dallas area in Texas next on the docket.
To hear more about what separates GoFor from its competitors – and even what distinguishes it from other sharing economy solutions like UberEats – watch the video above. To learn more about the issues facing Ottawa’s own construction industry, read the latest issue of the OBJ newsmagazine below.
