The Kenyan startup Eyby has launched a digital platform designed to modernize the African construction materials market, enabling manufacturers, distributors, and buyers to search, compare, and request quotes in a centralized environment that already processes millions of dollars in monthly transactions.
According to founder Hemal Doshil, Eyby was created to address the challenges of a sector marked by scattered catalogs, manual quoting processes, and fragmented supplier networks. The platform allows manufacturers to digitize their catalogs, distributors to strengthen their online presence, and buyers to search for, compare, and request quotes for construction materials in a centralized manner.
According to Doshil, the company identified a significant gap in the construction industry’s supply chain, where the lack of structured information hinders both manufacturers’ ability to promote their products and buyers’ ability to make decisions.
“While many sectors have already embraced digital transformation, the construction products market continues to operate with disconnected catalogs, manual quoting processes, and fragmented distributor networks,” said the founder.
Currently, the platform features approximately 25,000 products across 11,000 categories, has more than 4,000 monthly users, and processes approximately 300 quote requests per month—figures achieved even before the solution’s public launch.
One of the main challenges faced by the startup was organizing information from thousands of products and hundreds of manufacturers. According to the company representative, the data available in the sector is often inconsistent, incomplete, or presented in different formats, making it difficult to compare products technically.
To solve this problem, Eyby developed its own digital knowledge base, powered by artificial intelligence, capable of standardizing technical specifications, categories, and product attributes. The technology enables more advanced searches, recommends equivalent alternatives, and performs automatic comparisons between different brands.
The startup considers this technological infrastructure to be its main competitive advantage, as it improves the buyer experience and increases the digital visibility of manufacturers and distributors. In addition, it aims to consolidate the digital ecosystem of the construction industry and, at a later stage, generate revenue through premium subscriptions, advertising, and specialized digital services for manufacturers and distributors.
Kenya remains the company’s main market, but the plan is to gradually expand operations to other African countries, in line with the growing demand for digital solutions that make the procurement of construction materials more efficient.
“Our belief is that the industry needs more than just another online marketplace. By combining a solid foundation of product knowledge with a reliable digital marketplace, we are creating the infrastructure needed to modernize the way building materials are discovered, compared, and purchased in Africa—and, in the future, around the world,” concluded Hemal Doshil.
Source: Disrupt Africa
