Munich-based Sitegeist wants to address Europe’s backlog of broken concrete architecture.
German construction automation start-up Sitegeist has raised €4m for team expansion and scaled deployment of its AI-enabled robots that specialise in concrete renovation.
The pre-seed funding round was co-led by B2Venture and OpenOcean, with participation from angel investors including Verena Pausder, Lea-Sophie Cramer and Alexander Schwörer.
Sitegeist said that Europe is full of dated architecture and broken infrastructure, and that its robots can help with capacity constraints and backlogs around concrete renovation and repair of public buildings, bridges, tunnels and car parks.
“Infrastructure renovation is hitting a critical bottleneck, especially in concrete repair,” said Dr Lena-Marie Pätzmann, co-founder and CEO of Sitegeist.
“Today, deteriorated concrete is still removed using manually-intensive processes that are hard to scale. We’re tackling this challenge with the first ever specialized automated and modular robots that can perform concrete renovation directly on existing structures.”
According to the Munich-based company, concrete renovation is a complex, specialised, and time consuming sector of infrastructure maintenance, with a shortage of qualified labour compounded by strict safety requirements and specific requirements for individual sites leading to waiting lists of months or years.
Sitegeist said that while conventional automation approaches rely on pre-existing 3D models or standardised site conditions, its modular robots operate directly on existing structures and that by using advanced perception, AI-based decision support and adaptive control, they can handle complex geometries and varying material conditions without prior digitisation.
“The way concrete is removed today by workers is devastating and extremely arduous. This is the perfect case for augmenting humans with robots,” said Florian Schweitzer, a partner at B2Venture, which has previously invested in irish semiconductor start-up Equal1.
Sam Hields, a partner at OpenOcean, added: “Sitegeist’s non-humanoid robots are purpose-built to solve real-world problems, and their ability to operate in harsh environments with superhuman strength and autonomy is genuinely game-changing. This is exactly the kind of task we want AI to automate: a manual, expensive process with low talent availability.”
Sitegeist was co-founded by Pätzmann, Claus Carste, Julian Hoffmann and Nicola Kolb and comes from the same research environment as RobCo.
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