Berlin Startup Kuro Raises $11M to Revolutionize Construction AI

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-02

You know how general contractors are always buried in paperwork? Well, a Berlin-based startup called Kuro Technology just raised $11 million to tackle that exact problem with AI. And they're already making waves. ### The Funding Round: Who's Backing Kuro? The round was led by UVC Partners, a Munich and Berlin-based VC firm with over $880 million in assets under management. They've backed big names like Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, and Aleph Alpha. Foundamental, Realyze Ventures, and helloworld also joined in. "We're delighted to be working with Lea and Jonas," said Dr. Ingo Potthof, Managing Partner at UVC Partners. "We have known each other for many years, since well before Kuro was founded. They bring years of startup experience and deep industry knowledge, which matters a great deal in construction." He added, "And it's paying off: they are already delivering measurable value to customers with their first use cases in estimating, and are gradually extending the product to other back-office processes such as procurement, accounting, and compliance. The fast-growing customer base of leading general contractors proves their strategy right." ### From Frustration to Innovation: The Kuro Story Kuro Technology was founded in November 2024 by Lea Scherer and Jonas Minkler. Both had previously held leadership positions at construction-tech companies alcemy and Capmo. Today, the company employs 16 people and is on a mission to fix a core inefficiency in construction. Here's the thing: general contractors sit at the center of every project. Their sales, estimating, procurement, and site management teams spend about half their time sifting through project documentation and making sense of the data. Kuro's platform processes these documents and links them into a single data model. On top of that model, Kuro builds a customer-specific rulebook covering their specific building components, review criteria, and work packages. The platform flags contradictions between drawings and specifications before they become costly mistakes, assesses risk, improves 3D model components, processes public tenders, and evaluates subcontractor bids. When an estimator makes a correction, it's saved into the rulebook, meaning the same fix doesn't need to be made again on the next project. ### The Results Are Already Impressive According to UVC Partners, Kuro's customers are saving around 90 hours per bid. And 70% of users say the tool surfaced information they would have otherwise missed. Its clients include Goldbeck, Köster, Implenia, Geiger, Riedel, and Hochtief Infrastructure – six of the largest general contractors in the German-speaking region. "We see the construction industry as the foundation for progress in Europe," said Scherer, co-founder and CEO of Kuro Technology. "With Kuro, our job is to give it the technical foundation it needs to live up to this continent's ambition. The general contractors that manage to turn their knowledge into a product will depend less on individual people as they grow." ### What's Next for Kuro? Kuro plans to use the funds to build out its AI platform for general contractors that learns and improves with every project. Minkler, co-founder and CPO, explained, "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. That's why we're now expanding the platform step by step across the entire back office, building a system that learns and gets better with every project." So, if you're in construction, keep an eye on Kuro. They might just be the ones to finally bring AI to the job site in a way that actually makes sense.