Matera

About Matera

Matera is an early-stage platform exploring how AI can bring greater visibility from specification to sale across the AEC industry.

Today, the process between material specification, procurement, distribution, and construction execution remains highly fragmented. Architects, designers, contractors, developers, manufacturers, and distributors often work across disconnected systems, spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and manual workflows. As projects evolve, material substitutions, pricing changes, availability constraints, and communication gaps can create significant inefficiencies between what is designed and what is ultimately built.

Matera is being developed to help bridge these gaps through building materials intelligence, procurement visibility, and workflow automation.

The Problem

The vision behind Matera comes from over 20 years of experience across building materials, architectural sales, procurement, operations, and construction coordination within the AEC industry. Throughout that experience, a consistent challenge became clear: there is often limited visibility between design intent, procurement realities, and downstream execution.

Material decisions made early in the design process can significantly impact project budgets, timelines, substitutions, installation coordination, and final project quality - yet many teams still lack the connected information to make those decisions well. The gap is a familiar one in practice: a specification written in month two becomes a substitution request in month fourteen, by which point the original reasoning has usually been lost.

Areas of Exploration

The platform focuses on helping teams better understand material specifications in the context of real-world procurement and construction workflows. Current areas of exploration include:

• Specification and document analysis
• Material intelligence workflows
• Procurement coordination
• Supply chain visibility
• Specification-to-sale tracking
• Workflow automation across AEC teams
• AI-assisted operational workflows for material management

The goal is not simply to digitise existing workflows, but to create clearer connections between the people, products, and decisions that shape construction projects from concept through completion.

Reducing Manual Workflow Burden

In many construction projects, teams spend significant time manually reviewing specifications, coordinating substitutions, tracking approvals, validating product information, and communicating across multiple stakeholders. These workflows are often repetitive, fragmented, and difficult to standardise across organisations.

Matera is exploring how AI-assisted systems may help streamline portions of these processes while improving transparency and coordination between teams.

Structuring Building Materials Data

The platform is being developed with an understanding that building materials data is often inconsistent, unstructured, and distributed across multiple formats and systems. Product information may exist in specifications, submittals, technical sheets, emails, spreadsheets, ERP systems, distributor catalogues, or manufacturer databases.

Matera is exploring ways to organise and connect this information in a more structured and actionable format that supports both operational workflows and strategic decision-making.

Specification-to-Sale Visibility

Another area of interest is the relationship between specification activity and downstream sales visibility. Manufacturers and distributors often have limited insight into how products move from specification through procurement and final installation.

Matera is exploring how improved visibility across these stages could support stronger coordination, forecasting, and project tracking throughout the supply chain. For manufacturers, this is a commercially significant blind spot: a product specified early may or may not survive value engineering, and there is often no signal either way until an order arrives or does not.

Current Stage

Matera is currently in its early stages and continuing to evolve through industry conversations, workflow testing, and collaboration with professionals across architecture, design, construction, manufacturing, and distribution. The company is focused on learning directly from industry participants to better understand where operational bottlenecks exist and where AI-enabled workflows may provide meaningful value.

Focus Areas

• AI adoption in AEC
• Construction technology
• Material workflows
• Procurement intelligence
• Operational visibility across the built environment
• Data-driven coordination across project stakeholders

Long-Term Vision

As the AEC industry continues to adopt new technologies and AI-driven workflows, Matera is exploring how building materials data and procurement intelligence can become a more connected part of the project lifecycle.

The broader vision is to help create a more transparent, coordinated, and intelligent ecosystem for managing building materials across design, procurement, and construction operations.