Luxembourg-based LEKO Labs, a carbon-negative construction company committed to reinventing the construction process for next-generation buildings, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $21M (approx €18.57M) in its Series A round of funding. The company has now raised total funding of $23M to date.
Besides the funding, the company also announced that former Lilium (an aviation startup) CCO Dr Remo Gerber has also joined the company as CEO. LEKO Labs’ current CEO and founder Francois Cordier will be reverting to the CTO role and focus on furthering its groundbreaking sustainable building materials, robotics, and software development.
Cordier says, “I’m delighted to welcome Remo as our new CEO and our new investors to help deliver our vision towards a more sustainable building sector. Together we have a strong shot at the goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions in 2040 by 1 per cent using the LEKO Labs advanced building technology. His experience in scaling companies and capitalising them will be instrumental for the success of the company.”
Investors in this round
The round was led by urban sustainability technology VC fund 2150, which closed their first fund at $310M in October 2021. The fund’s mission is to invest in technologies addressing the planet’s most pressing climate change problems and they have, in particular, identified the built environment as a key challenge.
Christian Hernandez, co-founder at 2150, says, “The LEKO Labs team is on an important mission to help decarbonise the built environment with a fundamentally different and scalable approach. We are delighted to partner with LEKO Labs bringing our climate tech and strong European property investor basis to play and help adoption of a groundbreaking new approach.”
The total footprint of real estate developed, built or managed by LEKO Labs’ new investor base totals nearly 500 million sq ft., which corresponds to an area the size of Manhattan.
The round also saw participation from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Tencent, AMAVI, Rise PropTech Fund, Extantia, and Freigeist.
“Revolutionising the way buildings are created”
Founded in 2017 by Francois Cordier, LEKO Labs is on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable housing. The company says, “We are committed to revolutionising the way buildings are created by applying technology to overcome the inefficiencies of traditional construction.”
LEKO Labs has developed a novel wall and floor building material based entirely on wood and wood fibre, which is capable of replacing upto 75 per cent of concrete and steel currently used in constructing a single building.
With engineered wood and a fully circular manufacturing process, the system provides not only a sustainable approach to building but superior insulation properties with thinner walls, enabling up to 10 per cent more floor space for a given building. The technology can be used for buildings up to 100m tall and multiple developments are in completion to date in its Benelux home market, from homes to office buildings, data-centres and beyond.
LEKO Labs claims that the wall system is also highly insulating and can reduce the heating and cooling needs of a building by up to 87 per cent compared to today’s standards, while potentially enabling buildings to remain carbon neutral over their entire lifetime.
The company’s software platform calculates and optimises thermal, acoustic and static properties of the buildings, resolving moisture and noise problems typically associated with wooden buildings. Its algorithm optimises each building reducing wood usage vs traditional builds by up to 50 per cent, making the ‘best’ use of the natural resource.
The LEKO Labs system can be applied in most building settings from single-family homes to apartment or office buildings and industrial warehouses or data centres.
The company has grown to over 30 FTEs in Luxembourg and has recently opened a subsidiary in Switzerland and will soon open an office in London.
Capital utilisation
LEKO Labs claims that the funds will enable the company to scale its advanced software and robotics construction solution throughout Europe including Germany, the Nordics, and the UK, supplying finished walls from its factory in Luxembourg.
Dr Remo Gerber, CEO of LEKO Labs, says, “I could not be more excited to join the journey with Francois and the entire LEKO Labs team, it’s such an important and critical mission. We are making a difference today, each of our walls saves several tons of CO2 here and now. By scaling up our solution with automotive robotics we will achieve global impact in the coming years.”
