Interview with Jean-Gabriel Niel, co-director and CEO of Graneet

Batinfo: Can you give us a summary of Graneet's story?

Jean-Gabriel Niel: Graneet is a project that I started with my associates in 2020. In 2019, when I accompanied a construction SME to buy management software, I discovered how complex the administrative and financial monitoring of construction sites was and time-consuming due to the specific business characteristics of the sector. By studying the range of equipment available for SMEs, we realized that the existing solutions were generally unsuitable, complicated to set up and use, and often very expensive. For all these reasons, more than 50% of companies still use Excel today to manage their business...

For Véronique Combès, Manager of Combès Bâtiment: “Graneet is very good, it's very simple and we get to the point quickly. I never adapted to other tools, yet I tried several. »

Based on this observation, we saw a unique opportunity to provide a solution 100% adapted to the needs of these SMEs. We were convinced that the key to success was to build a product that was easy to learn, but very powerful and flexible. And for that, we needed to listen to future users. We spent nearly 2 months with Enzo Dozias, co-founder and CPO of Graneet, interviewing around a hundred construction company bosses to better understand their needs.

We were able to build during these exchanges the outline of what the Graneet solution would be and this allowed us to sign our first 3 customers.

With this validation in hand, at the beginning of 2020, we decided to create the company and convinced Raphaël Moulin, co-founder and CTO, to join us.

After 6 months of hard work, our first customers started using Graneet in June 2020. Things accelerated for us from there: we joined Station F's Founders Program, the team grew to 10 people, and Building on our initial successes and the trust of our customers, we are achieving a fundraising which allows us to accelerate the development of the software by recruiting new talents, and to settle in our own offices in the XNUMXth arrondissement in Paris.

We are now a team of 20 people, two-thirds working on the construction of the Graneet product, the remaining third being in charge of sales and support for new customers.

Convinced of the importance of building a very powerful but ultra easy-to-use solution, we spend a lot of time working on the components and the interface of our solution. We co-build our software with our customers and we therefore systematically carry out user tests of the new functionalities on which we are working.

Construction professionals have little time off the field to manage the financial and administrative follow-up of their projects and we want to help them implement better management practices to maximize their margin as a trusted partner.

For Arnaud Mercier, Partner of Innovative & Smart Buildings: “Graneet is a software that is easy to use and pleasant in addition to being ergonomic. The support is very responsive, the team is super available in the event of a problem and we feel that there is real support behind it. On the other hand, its development is co-constructed with the team. »

Batinfo: What is the current positioning of your product and of Graneet?

Jean-Gabriel Niel: We address SMEs in the construction industry of all trades that make at least 1 million euros in turnover. For smaller companies, our solution is probably a bit too advanced for their needs.

Unlike the majority of commercial construction management solutions, our solution is “cloud”, accessible online by subscription, and built on the latest technologies with particular attention paid to the user experience. We take care that access to data is as simple and intuitive as possible and that the interfaces are the most efficient. Our customers particularly appreciate the activity dashboards in Graneet which are a very good example of this.

We also differ in our marketing method: we do not go through resellers but only sell directly to our customers, which allows a fluid link between our teams and users.

When one of our customers has a problem, they have access to a direct communication channel with our technical teams.

Finally, with our desire to be close and responsive to help our customers quickly, we also invest a lot in the support and support that are at the heart of Graneet's DNA. The average response time to a customer is 5 minutes and the average processing time for a request is less than 30 minutes.

Key figures:

• 8500 work situations created directly via Graneet
• More than 3000 projects currently managed in the software
• 500 million euros billed last year by Graneet customers

Batinfo: What is Graneet's future?

Jean-Gabriel Niel: Our objective is to democratize the use of management solutions by SMEs in the construction industry, to help them better understand the financial monitoring of their activity and to boost their margins by providing them with visibility and transparency on their business, in real time.

We are finalizing the development of a group of functionalities allowing the management control of the projects to be able to manage the allocation of the various expenses project by project: edition of the purchase orders, follow-up of the purchases and the hours of labor work, budget analysis.

We are looking to go deeper into the construction value chain and want to integrate as many services as possible into our solution that can be useful to our customers and so we will from there work on connections to external services through partnerships.

To be able to implement this ambitious plan, we are continuing to recruit in all teams and will be around thirty people by the end of the year.

Your readers will also be able to find us for the first time at the Batimat show next October!