We Traded Piping
for 17 Years. Then
We Started Building.
We know this industry from the inside. We've read thousands of RFQs, negotiated with dozens of suppliers and customers, dealt with MTR chaos. That's exactly why we decided to build something better.
Why We Do This
The Quoting Bottleneck
After 17 years in piping trading, we've watched the same problem hold back every supplier we worked with.
Every piping supplier receives RFQs in different formats, languages, and abbreviations. The same product described 50 different ways. A sales team that spends hours matching line items by hand, checking inventory, looking up prices.
A 100-line RFQ takes a senior sales person half a day. Multiply that by 10 RFQs a week. That is your entire commercial team buried in manual work instead of selling.
Chinese and Indian manufacturers are getting faster every year. European suppliers that still rely on emails, phone calls, and Excel files are falling behind. Not because their products are worse, but because buying from them is slow and painful. The supplier who quotes first, wins.
The quotation engine automates this. Upload the RFQ, the engine reads every line, matches it against your catalog, applies your pricing rules, and produces a quotation. In seconds. The optional Shop module extends this to buyer self-service: same engine, with a buyer-facing interface on your domain.
Our Story
From Trading Desk to Software Company
2009
We start selling pipes
Projectmaterials is born as a piping trading company. Pipes, fittings, flanges, valves. We sell to EPC contractors and end users across Europe and the Middle East. We learn how this industry actually works, from the inside.
2013
We start writing about piping
We launch blog.projectmaterials.com because we realize nobody has done a proper job at explaining piping products online. One article at a time, it grows. Today it has 900+ technical articles and companies like Saudi Aramco, Shell, Bechtel, and Fluor read it daily. It's the #1 piping knowledge base on the internet.
2016
The idea that wouldn't go away
After years of reading messy RFQs where the same pipe shows up described in 50 different ways, we get an idea: what if we could build a system that reads any piping description and converts it into a standardized code? Same item, any format, one output. It sounds simple. It's absolutely not.
2016 - 2022
Six years. Six rebuilds. A lot of pain.
Building a engine for piping products turned out to be one of the hardest things we've ever done. We rebuilt the engine 6 times. Started with shell scripts. Moved to different platforms. Hit dead end after dead end. We dug into MESC, the oil and gas coding system that started in 1965. Parsed thousands of manufacturer catalogs. Mapped ASME, EN, DIN, JIS, GOST standards. Most of our attempts failed. But we couldn't let go. We were convinced the future of piping distribution was digital, and this engine was the foundation of everything.
2025
We go all in. And it works.
We bet everything on this. With the engineering team at Envestis SA, our IT sister company in Lugano, we finally crack it. 3M+ unique product codes. 98%+ precision. 100% deterministic, no AI, no probabilistic guessing, pure rule-based logic. Six years of failure turned into a working engine.
Q1 2026
The Quotation Engine goes live
European piping suppliers can now quote a 100-line RFQ/MTO in seconds. The optional Shop Module lets them open their catalog to external buyers. Both built specifically for stockists and mills that refuse to fall behind.
The Team
People Who Know Piping. People Who Ship Code.
Half the team spent years in piping trading. The other half builds enterprise software for a living. That mix is why our products actually solve real problems in this industry, not theoretical ones.
Leadership
Fabrizio
Founder & MD
Started Projectmaterials in 2009. 17 years of buying, selling, and sourcing piping products. Knows every pain point because he's lived through all of them.
Matteo
Business Development
Builds relationships with suppliers and EPC contractors across Europe and the Middle East. Turns real manufacturing problems into product features.
Shirin
Marketing
Runs marketing and brand across European markets. The reason our website and materials look like they were made by humans, not bots.
Michael
CTO
Designed and built 50+ enterprise platforms. The person who turned a messy idea about piping normalization into a production-grade engine.
Engineering
Tobias
Backend
Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL. Core engine and API layer.
Nikita
Backend
Data pipelines, catalog ingestion, search indexing.
Stefan
Backend
Integrations, ERP connectors, order tracking.
Anna
Frontend
UI/UX, Astro, Tailwind, HTMX. Builds what suppliers actually use.
Dmitri
DevOps
Docker, CI/CD, PostgreSQL. Keeps everything running.
Operating Company
Projectmaterials
Piping trading & software products
- projectmaterials.com
- blog.projectmaterials.com (900+ articles)
- Founded 2009
Technology Partner
Envestis SA
Software engineering & IT consulting
- Lugano, Switzerland
- envestis.ch
- Share capital CHF 100,000
- Zefix registry
- Founded 2014