Berlin Startup Kuro Just Raised $10.8M to Fix Construction's Biggest Time Sink

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-02

Construction is one of those industries that still runs on paperwork, gut instinct, and a whole lot of back-and-forth. A Berlin-based startup called Kuro Technology just raised €10 million (about $10.8 million) to change that — and the numbers behind their pitch are pretty hard to ignore. ### The Round and Who's Behind It The funding was led by UVC Partners, a Munich- and Berlin-based venture capital firm managing over €800 million in assets. They've backed names like Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, and Aleph Alpha, so they're not new to deep tech. Foundamental, Realyze Ventures, and helloworld also joined in. Dr. Ingo Potthof, Managing Partner at UVC Partners, put it simply: "They are already delivering measurable value to customers with their first use cases in estimating." He noted that Kuro is expanding into procurement, accounting, and compliance — and that a fast-growing customer base of leading general contractors proves the strategy is working. ### What Kuro Actually Does Kuro was founded in November 2024 by Lea Scherer and Jonas Minkler, who previously held leadership roles at construction-tech companies alcemy and Capmo. The company now has 16 employees and a clear mission: stop general contractors from drowning in documents. Here's the problem in plain terms. General contractors sit at the center of every project. Their sales, estimating, procurement, and site management teams spend roughly half their time just sifting through project documentation and trying to make sense of it all. That's not a small inefficiency — it's a massive drain on time and money. Kuro's platform processes all those documents and links them into a single data model. On top of that, it builds a customer-specific rulebook covering their building components, review criteria, and work packages. > "We started in estimation because that's where a project is born and decided. But the problems carry through into everything that follows: too much contradictory data and knowledge that isn't passed on from project to project." — Jonas Minkler, co-founder and CPO What does that look like in practice? The platform flags contradictions between drawings and specifications before they turn into costly mistakes. It assesses risk, improves 3D model components, processes public tenders, and evaluates subcontractor bids. And when an estimator makes a correction, it gets saved into the rulebook — so the same fix doesn't need to happen again on the next project. ### The Results Are Already Showing According to UVC Partners, Kuro's customers are saving around 90 hours per bid. That's more than two full work weeks per bid. On top of that, 70% of users say the tool surfaced information they would have otherwise missed. Their client list includes Goldbeck, Köster, Implenia, Geiger, Riedel, and Hochtief Infrastructure — six of the largest general contractors in the German-speaking region. These aren't small operations. They're companies managing massive projects where mistakes cost real money. ### Why This Matters Beyond Germany Scherer, co-founder and CEO, sees the bigger picture: "We see the construction industry as the foundation for progress in Europe. With Kuro, our job is to give it the technical foundation it needs to live up to this continent's ambition." She added that general contractors who manage to turn their knowledge into a product will depend less on individual people as they grow. That's a subtle but powerful shift — moving from relying on a few experienced estimators to building institutional knowledge that stays with the company. ### What's Next for Kuro The new funding will go toward building out the AI platform so it learns and improves with every project. The team is expanding step by step across the entire back office, creating a system that gets smarter over time. For anyone watching European ConTech, Kuro is one to keep an eye on. They're not just building software — they're trying to change how construction companies think about knowledge itself.