€7.7 million in new funding for modular carbon-neutral housing retrofit start-up ecoworks

ecoworks 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 build around the existing building as a second skin. Within weeks, the company can retrofit a extremely energy inefficient to an energy plus building. Serial retrofitting is expected to become a cornerstone of a cost-effective and accelerated energy transition in the building sector.

"We invested in ecoworks, because we are sure that the team will continue to actively shape the retrofitting market with their technology. Serial renovation will be key to achieving carbon-neutral housing", emphasized Raj Singh, General Partner at JLL Spark.

Raymond Levitt, Professor at the University of Stanford and Operating Partner at BlackhornVentures added, "Ecoworks has demonstrated impressively that the team can bring automated planning, onsite software tools and robotics in the renovation industry for energy-efficiency upgrading. This will undoubtedly play an important role on the way to net-zero emissions of older, energy-inefficient buildings."

"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," said ecoworks CEO and founder Emanuel Heisenberg. "We are very happy to have gained such a diverse and world-class group of investors in this oversubscribed round, including top U.S. construction and proptech VCs but also large German family offices with in-depth knowledge of the supply chain."

Due to increasingly climate-friendly regulation in the EU and Germany, the market growth for carbon-neutral renovations is expected to continue accelerating. The EU recently announced a new regulation that will ban renting out houses with the worst energy efficiency classes G and H. At the moment the renovation market in Europe is estimates at a size of 770 billion euros per year, 151 billion euros in Germany alone. In sight of increasing costs for materials, low productivity and an accelerating shortage of skilled labor, the construction technology desperately requires new technology to satisfy the demand.