What Five Startups at the BuiltWorlds Paris Summit Learned About Selling Into Construction
At the BuiltWorlds Paris summit, on a day hosted by VINCI’s Leonard, five founders pitched five completely different products: wireless EV charging, AI risk software, carbon capture bolted onto diesel generators, drill-free geothermal panels, and factory-built net-zero facades. The tech could not be more different. The barrier four of the five named, unprompted, was the same: construction is a slow, careful, reference-hungry buyer. Here is what each one is building, the wall four of them hit, the one founder who has not met it yet, and the playbook the others share.
The day belonged to the BuiltWorlds Paris Global Summit, with a full session hosted at Leonard, VINCI’s foresight and innovation platform and the arm of the world’s second-largest contractor that hunts for technology to reshape how things get built. Across back-to-back fifteen-second pitches, five founders gave a fast, honest tour of what is arriving on jobsites now.
The spread was wide. Four of the five chip away at carbon in different ways, one takes aim at project risk, and all of them are trying to change some habit on a jobsite.
What stood out was not the hardware. It was the answer that kept coming back when we asked about resistance. Not physics, not funding, but the industry itself.
Different problems, different tech, and for four of the five the same enemy: a buyer that needs proof, references, and zero disruption before it commits.
The lineup: five jabs at the same industry
What each one actually does
Read these back to back and the range is the point.
- Up and Charge. Wireless induction charging for B2B fleets. You park over a flat pad, it lifts to meet the car and pushes up to 24 kW of DC charging, no cable to plug in, trip over, or steal. A thin kit under the vehicle keeps the car’s warranty.
- EnerDrape. Drill-free geothermal panels that fix onto basement and car-park walls, turning underground concrete into a heating and cooling source. They run at a coefficient of performance of 3.5 to 5, roughly four units of heat out for every one put in.
- Kapture. A retrofit that clamps onto a diesel generator in under an hour and captures up to 90% of its CO2, then turns it into a high-purity mineral powder that drops straight into concrete as filler.
- Enlaye. AI that reads a project’s history and flags commercial, contract, and financial risk before it bites. Fresh off a 5 million dollar seed round, it is built on graph neural networks rather than a chatbot wrapper.
- ecoworks. Factory-built facades, complete with windows, insulation, and pipework, craned onto tired apartment blocks to hit net zero. Up to 50 apartments a week, no scaffolding, residents still living inside.
A quick note on Enlaye, the odd one out. Instead of reading one document at a time, it builds a network of past projects and hunts for patterns. Take the humble lane closure: get the permitting or politics wrong and it can wreck a schedule. Enlaye runs every lane-closure scenario from your last hundred jobs and hands a human the spread, so the person still makes the call, just with far more behind it. Our piece on AI-powered tech operators in construction covers where this is heading.
The wall four of them hit
Conservatism, by name
We did not coach the answers. We asked each founder what stops customers buying, and four of the five landed in the same place. Nicolas Razin, who runs sales for EnerDrape, put it bluntly: the barrier is conservatism and awareness. Buyers want data proving the tech will not harm their asset, and there is no budget line for “make the basement more efficient,” so the startup has to build the category before it can sell into it.
Emmanuel Heisenberg of ecoworks said the bottleneck was not the cranes or the panels but “transforming the customer.” His first deal needed a client willing to hand over a portfolio of empty homes, plus heavy discounts, just to get one reference building standing. Marin Champenois at Up and Charge, with a product that looks effortless, still spends real time knocking down “fake beliefs” about the induction kit under the car.
The buyer barrier is conservatism and awareness. They don’t know us, and there’s no special line for us in the tender.Nicolas Razin, Head of Sales, EnerDrape
One founder broke the pattern, and it is the most useful data point of the day. Raj Bagri of Kapture said she gets real interest and little pushback. Her barrier is that the hardware is still in field trials, not a wary buyer. Kapture has not met the wall because it is not selling at scale yet. The other four have, which is what separates a pre-commercial product from one already in the market.
For founders, the lesson is blunt: the hard part of construction tech is rarely the tech. It is a buyer who trusts peers over pitches and will not bet a live project on a demo, the same caution we unpacked in why construction is stuck with legacy systems.
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The playbook hiding in five pitches
Pull the five conversations apart and the same four moves show up. None is clever marketing. They are answers to a buyer who hates surprises.
Why VINCI keeps showing up
What it means if you actually build things
Start with the venue: Leonard hosted the day. But the same name keeps reappearing well beyond the host’s badge. Enlaye was supported through Leonard’s seed and Catalyst programs and now runs with VINCI teams. Kapture is doing R&D with VINCI Construction and its Australian arm Seymour White on low-carbon concrete. EnerDrape is working with VINCI in France, and Up and Charge credits the Leonard program with helping it sign its first contracts. A contractor that size is both testbed and reference, exactly the proof a cautious market asks for.
For the executive side of the room, the takeaway is practical. This is not five-years-away hype. Several can be piloted on a single site without touching wider operations, and the ones tied to VINCI come with deployment evidence you can check. Maturity varies, though, so ask where each one sits on that curve before you sign.
| Startup | What it does | Where it’s at | One proof point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up and Charge | Wireless induction charging for B2B fleets | Pilots with French fleets and public bodies; ~7m raised, Series A underway (founder’s figures) | Up to 24 kW DC, no cable, kit keeps the car’s warranty |
| EnerDrape | Drill-free geothermal panels on underground walls | Live installs running for years; partners include Engie and VINCI in France | Coefficient of performance of 3.5 to 5 versus 1 for a gas boiler |
| Kapture | Carbon capture retrofit for diesel generators | Final field trials this year; R&D with VINCI and Permacast | Up to 90% capture, byproduct goes into concrete with no green premium |
| Enlaye | AI predictive risk for projects | Live with GCs in US, Canada, France; $5m seed (June 2026) | Built on graph neural networks, augments human judgment |
| ecoworks | Factory-built net-zero facade retrofits | Commercial; social housing up to 8 storeys | Up to 50 apartments a week, costs falling 10%+ a year |
Leonard is VINCI’s foresight and innovation platform, and it hosted the day of the BuiltWorlds Paris Global Summit where these founders pitched. It also scouts and supports startups through seed and accelerator-style programs (such as its Catalyst track) that connect founders to VINCI’s operating teams. Worth being precise: Enlaye and Up and Charge came up through those programs, while Kapture, EnerDrape, and ecoworks are VINCI partners or summit guests rather than Leonard companies.
A thin induction kit fits under the vehicle, described by founder Marin Champenois as non-intrusive and warranty-safe. You park over a flat charging pad, it lifts to meet the car, and energy transfers wirelessly at up to 24 kW DC, with a 50 kW version planned for trucks. Champenois says induction loses only around 5% of energy, close to wired DC fast charging, while slow AC charging can lose 5% to 20%.
The hardware retrofits onto a diesel generator’s exhaust and captures the CO2 before it escapes, up to 90% of it according to founder Raj Bagri. That carbon is converted into a calcium carbonate powder at high purity, which can be used as a filler in concrete on site. Bagri says every ton of CO2 captured produces close to two tons of byproduct, and that the material performs better than what crews currently use, with no green premium.
No. Co-founder Philippe Rival and CTO Stamati Liapis are clear that the tool is built to augment human judgment, not replace it. It does not promise a single certain outcome. It runs many scenarios from past projects and hands the person a range, so a human still decides what risk to accept, just with more behind the decision. The model uses graph neural networks to compare projects on a like-for-like basis.
Construction runs on thin margins and long memories. One failed product or safety issue can end a career, so buyers want references and hard data before they commit, and there is rarely a budget line for a brand-new category. That is why founders like EnerDrape’s Nicolas Razin and ecoworks’ Emmanuel Heisenberg describe their hardest job as education and trust-building rather than engineering. The same caution slows software adoption too, which we unpack in our piece on legacy systems in construction.
Maturity varies, so ask each one directly. EnerDrape has installations running for years, Enlaye is live with general contractors across three countries, and ecoworks is commercial in social housing. Up and Charge is in pilots with major fleets and public bodies. Kapture was heading into its final field trials this year, so it is closest to the proving stage. The honest answer is that some are ready now and a couple are nearly there.
Across all five founders, four moves repeat: design for zero behavior change so no one has to retrain, win a single pilot and then replicate it site by site, borrow the credibility of a tier-one name like VINCI, and remove the green or cost premium so the decision is easy. The pattern rewards products that are boring to adopt and hard to argue with on price, not the flashiest demo.
BuiltWorlds 2026 Paris Global Summit
Leonard by VINCI
ENR: Enlaye raises $5 million seed
Harvard Innovation Labs: Enlaye
SmartCompany: Kapture embeds carbon in concrete
Business News Australia: Kapture and diesel generators
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