COMPANY

Name: Fohlio

Legal Name: Fohlio, Inc.

Location: New York City, New York

Founded: 2015

Founder(s): Huibin Yu

Website: https://www.fohlio.com

Social Media Following: 310 Followers on Twitter, 481 likes on Facebook, 191 followers on LinkedIn, 1110 followers on Instagram

INDUSTRY – Global Interior design industry

Size: $76,670Mn in 2013 (Source: Digital Journal)

Future: $121,054Mn in 2021

Introduction

The key to successful construction and interior design projects involves getting the right products at the right price. This requires juggling multiple vendors and product data sheets, which can end up being a time-consuming and mistake-prone process.

Architects, designers, engineers, and contractors can better manage the research, budget planning, selection and procurement of building products with an app by New York-based startup, Fohlio. It offers a centralized workflow for all critical tasks in architecture and interior design that, in turn, reduces time, cost and errors in the sourcing of products.

Fohlio seeks to help users get the right pricing from vendors and compile product data and presentations for clients.

The Product

A collaborative platform, Fohlio is built to automate the building product data collection, reduce data inaccuracies and effectively collaborate with clients, contractors, and vendors.

Users can build and search through the platform’s data libraries to get a better understanding of product specifications. Fohlio also has a web clipper that can extract product information from any website, and store it in the centralized product library. From color to size, price and finish of the product variants, everything is easily made available in this repository. You can even create and store mood boards specific to each project. Thus, the startup claims to reduce the user’s product data workload by more than half.

Fohlio also makes it possible to create PDFs of concept presentation or even invoices, in customizable templates, with just a few clicks.

The startup even offers 24-hour chat support to enable quick resolution of user issues.

Origin and Founding Team

While renovating her home, Huibin Yu realized how difficult it was to manage building product details, sticking to a budget, and tracking the status of installation and warranty documents.

Her experience was further backed by industry professionals who voiced similar concerns about the labor-intensive interior design process. That’s when this Columbia University grad decided to develop Fohlio to meet this market need.

The startup soon garnered significant interest from people around the world, which reassured Yu that Fohlio was resolving a global issue.

Prior to Fohlio, Yu was a VP at J.P. Morgan, building workflows and complex systems for the cross-asset derivatives trading desks.

Performance and Trends

With users in 1,033 cities, Fohlio attained an estimated valuation of $400k – $600k in March 2019, according to Dealroom.

In August 2018, the startup raised $150,000 from Quake Capital Partners. Shortly afterwards, in March 2019, it received $50,000 from Dreamit Ventures. According to Zoominfo, Fohlio generated revenues of $600,000 in Q2 2019.