Realyze Ventures joins the round led by UVC Partners; Kuro is expanding its AI platform for general contractors.
Europe has decided to build again: roads, housing, data centers, energy, defense. The EU states invested around 1.6 trillion euros in construction in 2025. This will be implemented primarily by the general contractors. They are at the center of every project, which means that all project data comes together with them. This quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of pages. Their teams in sales, costing, purchasing and construction management spend around half of their time sifting through and classifying this information. In addition, the documents of a project regularly contradict each other. If a contradiction remains undiscovered, the general contractor bears the damage, depending on the project, in the millions. Anyone who works on these projects makes decisions every day that are based on many years of experience and determine the success of the project. However, with every completed project, this knowledge is lost.
Kuro is building the AI foundation for general contractors. The platform reads all these documents and links them to a data model. Above this is the company’s set of rules – its components, test criteria and award units. The platform finds contradictions between plans and building specifications, analyzes what needs to be built and where the risks lie, enriches components in 3D models, processes public tenders and evaluates subcontractor offers. Corrections to the calculator remain in the set of rules and apply to the next project.
The result: less time and higher quality. Customers report time savings of around 90 hours per offer. 70 percent of users say Kuro has found information that they would otherwise have overlooked. This prevents expensive errors or even major damage on the construction site.
Its customers include Goldbeck, Köster, Geiger, Riedel and Implenia. Six of the twelve customers are among the 20 largest general contractors in the German-speaking world.
“We calculate more offers with the same team, but that is the side effect. It is crucial that we quickly identify risks in the tender before we hand in the award,” says Nils Köster, CEO of Köster GmbH.
The orders are coming. At the same time, the construction industry is losing its experience: In Germany alone, around 19,800 employees in the main construction industry retired in 2024 – and with them their knowledge.
“An industry that forgets faster than it learns cannot fulfill these orders. We see the construction industry as the foundation of progress. With Kuro, it is our task to give it the technical foundation with which it meets the ambition of this continent. The GCs that manage to productize their knowledge become less dependent on individuals as they grow,” says Lea Scherer, CEO of Kuro Technology.
“We started in costing because that’s where the project is born and decided,” says Jonas Minkler, co-founder and CPO of Kuro Technology. “But the problems run through the following areas: too much contradictory data and knowledge that is not passed on from project to project. That’s why we’re now expanding the platform step by step to the entire back office and building a system that learns and gets better with each project.”
“We are pleased to be able to work with Lea and Jonas. We have known each other for many years, even before Kuro was founded. They have many years of startup experience and in-depth industry knowledge, which is of great importance, especially in the construction industry. And this pays off: They achieve measurable customer benefits with the first use cases in the calculation and gradually expand the product to other back-office processes such as purchasing, accounting and compliance. The rapidly growing customer base with leading general contractors is proof of their strategy,” says Dr. Ingo Potthof, Managing Partner at UVC Partners.
Kuro was founded in 2024 by Jonas Minkler and Lea Scherer, who had previously worked in the construction industry for eight years each. The company employs 16 people in Berlin.
Sources of market figures
– EU construction investment 1.6 trillion euros (2025): FIEC Statistical Report 2025/2026
– 500 billion euros special fund for infrastructure: Federal Government (March 2025)
– €800 billion ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030: European Commission / EP
– 19,800 retirements in the main construction industry in 2024: Main Association of Germans
Construction industry
