ecoworks rakes in €7.7 million to boost carbon-free retrofitting for housing

Berlin-based Ecoworks has brought in €7.7 million in funding to automate the design process for retrofitting housing stock. After commissioning the first serial carbon-neutral renovation in Germany, the company plans to scale its solution and work on further automating planning and on a new product release to increase the prefabrication level.

The round was backed by new investors, including Warema Group, JLL Spark Global Venture, the investment arm of JLL, and the US-based construction tech venture capital funds Zacua Ventures and Blackhorn Ventures. Existing investors PropTech1 and Motu Ventures also participated in this round. 

There has been a boom in startups aiming to accelerate the shift to carbon-neutral housing in Europe. As part of the effort to halt Russian oil and gas imports, the German government has proposed a new regulation that includes requiring and subsidising mass housing renovation to deal with the country’s inefficient housing stock and gas heating dependence.

Betting big on the retrofitting segment, the platform uses digital 3D planning and prefabrication to shift up to 80% of the activities from the construction site to factories. The company develops and designs façade and roof elements that can be built around the existing building as a second skin. According to the startup, it can retrofit an extremely energy inefficient building to energy plus building within weeks.

ecoworks CEO and founder Emanuel Heisenberg said: “We will use the investment to strengthen our product in the field of automatic planning, on hardware, and on growing our team and supply chain to increase capacity and delivery.”

Raj Singh, general partner at JLL Spark added: “Serial renovation will be key to achieving carbon-neutral housing. ecoworks is shaping the retrofitting market with their technology.”