Munich-based KEWAZO, a construction robotics company, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €10M in a Series A round of funding led by Fifth Wall. Cybernetix Ventures, Unorthodox Ventures and Nemetschek also participated in the round.
Existing investors True Ventures and MIG Capital AG also contributed. The announcement comes over an year after raising €4.2M in a Pre-Series A round of funding in September, 2021.
The latest round raises the total funding to $20M (approximately €18.4M).
“We have an excellent group of partners coming together that will enable us to keep building a leading company in construction robotics,” states Artem Kuchukov, CEO and co-founder of
KEWAZO. “This influx of capital will propel us to expand our sophisticated robotic fleet across Europe and North America, enabling us to build our additional digital services.”
KEWAZO: What you need to know
Founded by Alimzhan Rakhmatulin, Sebastian Weitzel, Eirini Psallida, Ekaterina Grib, Leonidas Pozikidis, and Artem Kuchukov in 2018, KEWAZO is digitising the construction industry with robotics and data analytics.
The German company has developed a smart robotic elevator, – LIFTBOT, for industrial and construction sites, with the first application focus being scaffolding assembly.
KEWAZO says that 80 per cent of projects, when it comes to building or dismantling scaffolding, are done manually. LIFTBOT makes assembly efficient and saves 70 per cent of man-hours, addressing the critical labour shortage and risk of accidents on-site.
With few adjustments, LIFTBOT can be used in additional tasks such as insulation, painting, and other on-site material transport. At the same time, LIFTBOT also collects operational data, processes it, and provides it as an actionable insight through the data analytics platform.
It assists in planning and improving profitability, and customers benefit from faster, more predictable projects, claims the company.
Fifth Wall
Fifth Wall is a Certified B Corp venture capital firm focused on technology for the global real estate industry.
The VC has approximately $3.2B in commitments and capital under management. Fifth Wall is backed by a global mix of more than 100 strategic limited partners (LPs) from more than 15 countries, including BNP Paribas Real Estate, British Land, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Hilton, Host Hotels & Resorts, and among others.
“Labour shortage continues to be the most acute challenge facing the construction industry today,” says Miguel Nigorra Esteban, Partner at Fifth Wall. “Artem and his entire team at Kewazo are laser-focused on solving this head-on, bringing much-needed automation and robotics to the trillion-dollar construction industry. We’re thrilled to be a part of their category-defining growth.”
“I think it is very useful that companies like KEWAZO are disrupting our business. We will have problems in finding and keeping good personnel – this will be our main focus in the coming
years and decades. These innovations are very helpful in attracting and motivating our coworkers and help us to provide our customers with cost-effective and safe services,” says Bart Gyssels, Chief Innovation Officer at Altrad Services Benelux.
