Automating construction makes plain sense on the face of it. It’s one of the world’s biggest industries. It’s also among the most expensive and, often, dangerous. Certainly it checks off the three Ds (dull, dirty, dangerous) of automation quite plainly.

We encountered Kewazo several years back when the Munich-based startup participated in a TC Sessions: Robotics pitch-off. Sometimes startups take a lot of explaining off the bat. This isn’t one. At the center of the offering is the firm’s first product, Liftbot. The system is effectively an automated hoist system that ascends and descends scaffolding systems.

It takes two workers around 20 minutes to install (per the company), is fully battery powered and wireless and is able to arrive at its destination without manual interference. Like a number of construction robotics firms, Kewazo got a nice boost during the pandemic, as construction reopened, but many companies suddenly had trouble filling roles.

“Despite already existing labor shortages, it became impossible for foreign workers to commute back to their home countries and come back,” co-founder and CEO Artem Kuchukov tells TechCrunch. “Many sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Singapore massively suffered from that, as a large percentage of their workforce simply wasn’t there anymore. That was a huge catalyst for construction automation, as companies began to look for ways to sustain their businesses without relying on an uncertain labor supply.”

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