Zürich-based Scalera raises $6.5M to simplify construction procurement

Swiss constructiontech Scalera has secured $6.5 million in seed funding to address inefficiencies within public and private construction procurement.

The round was led by firstminute capital and Speedinvest, with participation from a strategic group of angel investors including Google executives, unicorn founders, and seasoned construction industry veterans.

Founded out of ETH Zürich, Scalera is tackling a sector widely recognized as one of the least digitised: construction. With mounting delays in infrastructure delivery and rising demands for housing, transport, and energy projects, the startup wants to accelerate Europe's building pipeline.

“The opportunity is enormous, but the system is broken,” said Leonardo Reinhard, co-founder and CEO of Scalera. “To win public tenders today, companies still comb through thousand-page PDFs, copy line items into Excel, and email suppliers one by one. We started Scalera to end that madness and get vital projects moving again — faster, more affordably, and with total transparency.”

Scalera’s core product uses artificial intelligence to automate the parsing of complex tender documents, match supplier catalogs to line items, and help contractors generate bids in a fraction of the time. It supports industry taxonomies such as NPK, BKP, VOB, and ÖNorm, streamlining collaboration across different national standards in Europe.

This automation shortens bid preparation timelines. In a market where time and accuracy are critical to securing contracts, the platform aims to replace the outdated manual processes that dominate the sector.

“LLMs and Generative AI are one of the most exciting platform shifts in technology,” said Sam Endacott, Partner at firstminute capital. “We believe much of the commercial value will be built by teams focused on verticalised use cases in sectors which have yet to fully undergo digital transformation. The construction sector is a perfect example of this, which is why we are so excited to partner with the Scalera team.”

“The construction and real estate sector, the largest in Europe, is still stuck in outdated, cumbersome, and inefficient processes,” said Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, General Partner at Speedinvest. “We believe AI has the power to bring construction companies to the next level by automating essential mid- and back-office functions, improving overall efficiency and profitability.”