Why we invested in Toggle
Chip Meakem, Managing Partner
We have a pretty simple mission statement at TVP: we partner with gritty and determined entrepreneurs leveraging emerging technologies to create or disrupt massive markets.
We met Dan Blank, the founder and CEO at Toggle, back in 2019. Toggle is building new technology to increase safety, efficiency, and productivity for the world’s most ubiquitous building material: reinforced concrete. As with many of our Series A lead investments, we tracked and built a relationship with Dan and the team since before their seed round. When Toggle started to think about their Series A raise, we had a good relationship in place and a strong appreciation for what the team had accomplished and where they were headed. Let’s map Toggle to our mission statement:
We partner with gritty and determined entrepreneurs: By the time we closed the Series A, Dan and the core team had been at it for over four years. They’d gone from idea to shipping robotically built rebar cages for commercial use in high-rise towers and renewable energy platforms. Attacking legacy markets such as construction can be challenging, and the Toggle team relentlessly solved many of those through grit and trial and error.
Leveraging emerging technologies: Toggle leverages ML and AI tech, and their ever-growing proprietary training data set and process is key.
To create or disrupt massive markets: The global rebar market is about $500B/year, with labor the largest component of the cost structure. Reinforced concrete is one of the most consumed materials on the planet. Every public and/or private infrastructure project in the world uses reinforced concrete. Almost all of that rebar has been made the same way for over 150 years — manual laborers using wire twist ties and/or welds to turn raw rebar into often highly complex cage structures.
We asked ourselves if in 10 years, armies of high cost, hard to find laborers working in very dangerous environments will be making rebar cages, or will at least a large portion of this market move to robotic solutions? The answer seems obvious to us. Toggle’s disruptive solution provides a fantastic opportunity to be a huge market leader in the future state of the reinforced concrete market.
Congrats again to Dan and the Toggle team. We are thrilled to be on this journey with you!
