Luxembourg-based Leko Labs, a construction startup that’s developing sustainable wood-based building materials as an alternative to steel and concrete and applying automation to construction methods, has closed a $21 million Series A round of funding.

The raise is led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150 with participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Tencent, AMAVI, Rise PropTech Fund, Extantia and Freigeist.

Construction is of course an extremely dirty business. Not just literally, given the earth and dust that inevitably gets churned up — but in carbon emissions terms: Per a 2017 report by the World Green Building Council, building and construction activities jointly account for 39% of energy-related CO₂ emissions when upstream power generation is included.

Shrinking the carbon footprint of construction must, therefore, be a key plank of global net zero climate strategy.

Leko Labs bills itself as a “carbon negative” construction company — on account of having developed a novel wall and floor system based solely on wood and wood fibre, which it says is capable of replacing up to 75% of concrete and steel currently used in constructing a single building.

Its wood composite product is built to withstand high compression loads (30,000x its own mass, is the claim); and — if sourced from sustainable forestry, meaning trees felled for timber are replanted; and assuming a long, productive lifespan to the material/building — it should sequester substantially more carbon versus a traditional build made using concrete and steel which require extremely energy intensive processes to manufacture.

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