Investible’s Climate Tech Fund has co-led SPEC Toolbox’s (SPEC) Pre-Series A round with Black Nova, alongside strong backing from Understorey, Impact Ventures, Archangels and Giant Leap. In these investment notes, we will share why we chose to back Adam, Ringo and the team, and why we believed they are poised to capture a fast-growing market.

The sustainability gap: demand for low-carbon materials outpaces legacy design tools

The construction industry is rapidly shifting towards sustainable materials such as mass timber, driven by sustainability targets, Green Star incentives, and increasing cost competitiveness. Mass timber opens up new design possibilities, especially for mid-rise buildings on tight or irregular city lots where traditional materials fall short, while building codes and standards are gradually catching up, lowering regulatory risk. However, existing engineering workflows remain anchored to legacy software solutions built for concrete and steel, limiting the efficiency and potential of mass timber projects.

Designing with mass timber remains technically complex – structural engineers continuously navigate through evolving building codes and material-specific considerations such as fire, acoustics, vibrations and composite systems, many of which are not fully codified in Australia.

Structural engineers have a dominant reliance on custom spreadsheets, introducing material operational and compliance risks. Spreadsheets are difficult to review, prone to version-control issues and vulnerable to errors when codes of assumptions change. Reviewers often struggle to trace how outputs are derived, especially when structural engineers also have varying calculation methodologies. Outside of spreadsheets, existing software alternatives provide limited timber-specific functionality and often opaque “black boxes” – a critical weakness in safety-led building design.

Structural disconnect between product specifiers and suppliers

Suppliers have limited digital distribution and poor attribution: they often do not know when, where or why their products are specified – limiting their sales funnel and growth potential. For engineers, supplier data is fragmented across PDFs, websites and proprietary libraries that is also constantly changing, making comparisons difficult and reinforcing habitual supplier selection. While this creates product stickiness for existing suppliers, this lack of visibility creates material supplier-concentration risk for specifiers, particularly where projects rely heavily on a small number of manufacturers.

At the same time, sustainable material suppliers face poor digital distribution and limited insights into customer behaviour, restricting their ability to scale efficiently in a rapidly growing market.

So…why SPEC Toolbox?

SPEC identified this problem early and built a streamlined platform that solves this siloed and manual process of designing and specifying building materials. SPEC offer’s a specifier-led, supplier-flexible platform that unlocks a new design and procurement model for manufactured sustainable building materials, starting with mass timber.

The platform is a two-sided marketplace, connecting design professionals with product manufacturers through a data-rich, usage-based model:

·      For structural engineers: The platform provides a suite of deep technical calculators, pre-loaded with verified supplier data, that automate early-stage and detailed structural design. It also simplifies compliance with local building codes and helps reduce design time significantly

·      For manufacturer suppliers: SPEC functions as a sales enablement and analytics platform, providing detailed data on product selection behaviour and enabling attribution metrics such as cost-per-specification or cost-per-print.

First-of-its-kind, SPEC stands out as the only transparent, supplier-integrated, and compliance-aligned software purpose-built for mass timber and sustainable material design. It replaces legacy spreadsheets, accelerates workflows, improves QA, and enables structural engineers to confidently deliver timber projects. Moving forward, SPEC aims to become the operating system for sustainable construction, broadening to broader structural engineering and serve a wider range of building professionals and material categories.

A credible, domain-led founding team

SPEC’s foresight comes from the credible and technically grounded founding team with domain market insights. Co-founders Adam Jones and Ringo Thomas are highly regarded in the industry for their domain expertise and credibility across the construction value chain. They bring a rare combination of technical depth and market insight – demonstrating a strong understanding of both engineer pain points and supplier constraints.This dual perspective has shaped the foundation of SPEC and is clearly reflected in their product roadmap, which aims to unify a historically siloed ecosystem by serving as an integrative platform for both design and procurement workflows.

The numbers speak for itself

Investible has had the privilege to have followed the SPEC Toolbox journey over past 18 months (that’s a lesson for all founders… keep investors updated!). They have shown strong signs of growth potential having 13x their ARR since we first saw them and have achieved commercial validation from global industry leaders such as KLH, Rothoblaas, and Timberlink.. These partnerships reflect both global category leadership and a clear willingness to pay for data, distribution, and software integration, validating SPEC Toolbox’s business model and platform value.

Leading engineering firms such as Aurecon and AECOM have also joined SPEC’s platform, reinforcing its relevance within enterprise-grade design environments..

We are just as excited as their suppliers and engineers to join SPEC on their journey to digitalise and build manufactured buildings across the world, one timber at a time.