New features added to Flexcavo

German rental startup Flexcavo has added new features to its platform, including a position timeline view that enables users to locate and schedule equipment, and a costing feature for construction sites.

Flexcavo’s Bauma stand. (Photo: KHL)

Talking to IRN at Bauma, Dr Oliver Oechslein, Head of Product at Flexcavo, said the additions were targeted at both contractors and rental companies.

“If you’re a rental company and a customer says, ‘I’ll need an excavator from February to March’, the timeline feature enables you to plan that in to avoid double booking.

“The costing element collates costs on the construction site for contractors; and you can also add the cost of services into that.

“For rental companies, they can rent out a machine and add individual customised services into that rental period, for example cleaning the machine or some element of maintenance.

“Overall our software is designed to help manage the rental process from the yard to the construction site either for a construction company with its own yard and construction sites that it’s working on, or a rental company with its own yard with external contractor clients’ construction sites.

“The part that relates to rental companies, and the part that relates to construction companies allow both parties to work effectively with each other.”

Founded about two years ago, Berlin and Munich based start-up Flexcavo initially raised about € 7.5 million in seed funding from venture capital investors.

As well as its own fleet of over 400 machines, Flexcavo supplies apps and software linked to telematics systems. These are fitted to its own rental fleet as well as to a construction companies’ or rental companies’ equipment.

Oechslein said the company was increasingly positioning itself as a software specialist.

“For us the focus is really on the software at the moment,” he told IRN. “We use the rental yard to focus on the processes and really understand how sites work and to understand the individual pain points for construction companies and rental businesses.

“There is a lot of competition out there in just renting out machines without any software support, so that’s why our core focus was always software; the physical rental part was a way to learn about rental, to gain trust and to get into the market.”

Flexcavo’s presence at Bauma is to support its primary focus on growth within Germany and other German speaking countries of central Europe, including Switzerland and Austria.

“The German market is so huge and there are so many construction and equipment rental companies who are still using paper-based analogue and offline approach. Certainly for the software part of our business we’re focused on growing nationally across Germany.”