KEWAZO spent its early years trying to bring lifting robots to construction sites. Then the founders realised something uncomfortable: their best customers were not contractors. They were chemical plants, refineries, and power stations. CEO Artem Kuchukov, who joined Bricks & Bytes after closing a $16M Series A extension that brings the round to $35M, walked us through why he pivoted out of construction and what it tells you about who actually pays for innovation in heavy industry.
There is a particular type of founder story the construction tech industry does not love telling. A smart team builds a useful robot, points it at construction, runs into a customer base that admires the technology but refuses to pay for it, and quietly redirects the company toward an adjacent industry that will. KEWAZO is exactly that story, except the founders are unusually honest about it.
The Munich-based company recently announced a $16M Series A extension led by Schooner Capital, with participation from Chevron Technology Ventures, Asahi Kasei, and existing backers including True Ventures. That brings their Series A to $35M and total funding to roughly $40M. LIFTBOT, their robotic lifting system that replaces cranes for vertical material movement, is now deployed across more than 20 sites. Almost none are conventional construction sites.
That choice was not the original plan.
KEWAZO’s pivot from construction to oil and gas, chemicals, and power is not a story about better technology. It is a story about better customers. The buyers who will pay for innovation are the ones whose downtime costs millions per hour, not the ones whose margins live and die on the lowest subcontractor bid.
The product that started it
A lifting robot born to fix scaffolding
KEWAZO was founded in 2016 out of TU Munich. The original product was LIFTBOT, an autonomous battery-powered hoist designed to move material vertically on construction and industrial sites without a crane and without the manual handling that drives most scaffolding accidents. The first use case was scaffolding assembly, a $50B global industry where, as the company has previously pointed out, more than 80% of work is still done entirely by hand.
Early deployments went well. By 2021 a dozen LIFTBOTs were in service across Europe. The technology worked. The business case looked clean: cut man-hours by around 70%, reduce accidents, generate operational data along the way. On paper, exactly the kind of robotics product the construction industry says it wants. We have written previously about why the right business model in construction robotics is rarely “sell the robot”, and KEWAZO’s experience is a textbook case of why.
What the team learned was that admiration is not adoption. Construction firms loved the demo. They were less enthusiastic about signing the cheque.
Why construction was the wrong customer
Solvency, incentives, and who actually carries the cost
Speaking on the Bricks & Bytes podcast, Kuchukov was direct about it. The lesson was not that construction is technologically resistant. It is that construction’s commercial structure punishes the people who would benefit most from buying the robot.
His phrasing was memorable: selling to ExxonMobil is not actually that much harder than selling to a German general contractor. The team had been afraid of the enterprise sales motion required for big oil and gas deals. Once they had survived German GCs, every other industry felt easier. The mismatch was not the buyer’s sophistication. It was the buyer’s incentive to act.
Construction has a layered incentive problem that almost every robotics founder runs into. Owners do not pay for how their general contractors execute. GCs do not pay for how subcontractors execute. Subcontractors compete on the lowest bid for a labour-intensive scope. Nowhere in that chain does anyone have a strong commercial reason to fund a productivity tool whose savings accrue to someone else. KEWAZO’s pivot is one of the cleanest case studies of that dynamic playing out.
To sell to ExxonMobil is not that much more difficult than selling to a construction company. After you sell to a German construction company, you can sell to anyone.Artem Kuchukov, CEO of KEWAZO, on the Bricks & Bytes podcast
What heavy industry has that construction does not
Downtime costs and the $200K scaffold
The single number that explains the pivot is the rent on a scaffold inside a nuclear power plant. Hellermann shared the figure on the show from his own time at one of the world’s largest utilities: roughly $200K per month for the rental of the rig itself, before labour. That number is not unusual for heavy industrial maintenance. It is the going rate.
The reason the rent looks like that is the underlying asset. When a chemical plant or a refinery is down, it is not generating cash. One hour of downtime in some plants can cost several million dollars. The customer has an enormous, quantifiable, P&L-visible incentive to compress maintenance schedules. A robot that moves materials vertically faster and safer is not a productivity nice-to-have. It is a downtime hedge with measurable ROI.
That dynamic is the inverse of the construction site economic. On a project, the scaffold is a cost line item buried inside a subcontractor’s bid. There is no equivalent of “the asset is offline and burning cash.” The buyer who could pay is the asset owner, but the spec is set far down the chain by people whose contracts give them little upside from saving time.
What the new customer base actually wants
Data is the upsell, not the lead
Once KEWAZO was inside heavy industrial sites, customers wanted more than just the lift. The robots collect material flow data on every job, and that data turns out to be the part operators care about most over time. Kuchukov compares it to a blood test: a lightweight signal that tells you a lot about the health of the plant before you decide where to do deeper diagnostics.
That is where ONSITE, the company’s analytics platform, sits. The robot is the wedge. The data layer is the moat. It is the same broad pattern we saw in the Monumental playbook: hardware that earns its way onto site, then a software layer that compounds value the more often the robot deploys.
The recent funding announcement reflects this positioning. Chevron Technology Ventures and Asahi Kasei are not strategic investors in a construction robotics company. They are strategic investors in industrial automation. The signal is unambiguous about where this business is now pointed.
Hear Artem tell the story in his own words
Kuchukov’s full conversation on why KEWAZO pivoted is on the latest Bricks & Bytes episode. Worth the listen.
Listen to the episodeConstruction vs heavy industry as customers, side by side
| Dimension | Construction site | Heavy industrial plant |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of downtime | Spread across project; often absorbed by subcontractor | Direct, visible, quantified in $M per hour |
| Who has incentive to buy | Owner, but they do not spec the work | Asset owner, who spec’s the work directly |
| Sales cycle | Long, fragmented, low conviction at the top | Long but high conviction once economics are proven |
| Willingness to pay for safety | Stated, rarely priced in | Hard-coded into operating procedures |
| Data value | Low; everyone optimises for next job | High; same plant, same crews, repeatable |
Frequently asked questions
KEWAZO builds LIFTBOT, an autonomous battery-powered robotic hoist that moves material vertically on construction and industrial sites without a crane. Its sister product ONSITE turns the operational data the robot collects into an analytics layer for plant operators and project managers. The company was founded in Munich in 2016 by a team out of TU Munich. (Source)
KEWAZO recently announced a $16M Series A extension led by Schooner Capital, with participation from Chevron Technology Ventures, Asahi Kasei, Benson Capital, Mana Ventures, Gaingels, Atlas Ventures, and existing investors True Ventures and Cybernetix Ventures. That brings the Series A to $35M and total funding to approximately $40M. (Source)
Founder Artem Kuchukov has been candid that the issue was not the technology. It was the commercial structure of construction itself. Owners do not spec the work, GCs do not pay for the savings, and subcontractors compete on price for the scope. By contrast, heavy industrial customers have direct, quantified incentives to reduce maintenance downtime, which makes the ROI on a lifting robot legible at the buying table. (Source)
That figure is the monthly rental cost for a single scaffolding rig inside the main room of a large power plant during maintenance, cited from Patric Hellermann’s experience at one of the world’s largest utilities. The number is a useful proxy for how much heavy-industrial customers are already paying to keep complex assets serviceable, and why a robot that cuts crew time and rig duration has obvious ROI for them. (Source)
Not necessarily, but it does mean the business model has to be chosen carefully. Selling robots outright to contractors has been a graveyard. The models that look more durable are robotics-as-a-service and outcomes-as-a-service, where the startup operates the robot as a subcontractor and is paid for completed work, as we covered in our piece on outcome-as-a-service robotics. The KEWAZO story is less a verdict on construction robotics than a verdict on selling hardware into a price-driven supply chain. (Source)
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