Kuro, a Berlin company that sells AI software to general contractors, announced a €10 million funding round on September 30, 2026. UVC Partners led the round, and Foundamental, Realyze Ventures and helloworld also invested, according to the announcement on UVC’s website. The software works on bid-stage document review, the job an estimating team does before it prices a project: reading the drawings, specifications and bills of quantities in a tender and finding where they disagree.
What it does
The contractor’s team uploads the whole tender package. Kuro’s platform page lists the formats it reads, including PDFs, Office files, emails, images, IFC models and GAEB files, the German exchange format for bills of quantities. The software sorts and versions the documents. When an owner reissues a package, it shows which files changed between the two uploads and removes duplicates.
Each customer then loads what Kuro calls a rulebook, made up of its own building components, review criteria and work packages. With that in place, the software answers a standard list of questions about each new project and checks the drawings, the specs and the bill of quantities against each other. It rates each contradiction it finds by risk, and every answer links back to the source page. When an estimator corrects a result, the correction stays in the rulebook for the next job.
Kuro’s website describes further modules:
- A room data agent that reads each room’s requirements, from flooring to ventilation, from the drawings and specs and writes them back into the Revit model.
- A bid check that converts subcontractor bids sent as PDFs into GAEB files and flags where a sub changed quantities, wording or line items from the bid form.
- An agent that screens public tenders against the company’s references and pre-fills the applications to bid.
So the daily users are estimators and preconstruction managers, with BIM staff on the Revit side. Kuro says it started in estimating and plans to extend the platform to procurement, accounting and compliance.
Evidence so far
The evidence so far is the funding announcement, Kuro’s website and a case study of one customer, Köster GmbH, a turnkey general contractor in Osnabrück. These are the figures Kuro has published:
| Claim | Figure | Who reported it |
|---|---|---|
| Time saved per bid | About 90 hours | Kuro, citing customer reports, in the funding announcement |
| Users who say Kuro found information they would otherwise have missed | 70% | Kuro, in the funding announcement |
| Estimating time saved at Köster | 6 hours per estimator per week on average | Survey of Köster estimators, in Kuro's case study |
| Size of a tender package at Köster | About 4,000 A4 pages on average, over 100,000 on the largest projects | Kuro's case study |
| Customers | 12, of which 6 are among the 20 largest general contractors in the German-speaking region | Kuro, in the funding announcement |
| Pages processed | Over 1 million per month | Kuro's website |
Each of the headline figures counts something a little different.
- The 90 hours per bid comes from customer reports, as the announcement describes it.
- The 70% is a share of users who say Kuro found information they would have missed. It records what users believe the tool caught.
- The Köster figure comes from a survey of Köster’s estimators, so it is self-reported time, averaged per estimator per week.
A detection rate would count something else: the share of real conflicts in a tender package that the software flagged. Software teams call that recall. The bid sample behind the 90-hour figure and the software’s miss and false-alarm rates are not yet public.
The case study adds a detail about how Köster tested the product. Lea Scherer, Kuro’s CEO, says in it that Kuro first had to show on Köster’s past projects that it found problems Köster’s own team had not. Nils Köster, Köster’s CEO, describes the payoff in the announcement: “What matters is that we spot risks in the tender quickly, before we submit our price.” (Kuro was founded in November 2024 and has 16 employees in Berlin.)
How to measure it on your projects
Track the pre-bid catch rate for document conflicts. Count every conflict between drawings, specs and bid forms on a job. The catch rate is the share your team flagged before submitting the price. The rest surface later as RFIs, change orders or cost the job absorbs.
Köster’s trial of Kuro started with past projects, and the baseline can too:
- Pick 5 to 10 recently awarded jobs that are past the early RFI phase.
- Go through each job’s RFI log and change order log, and tag every item that traces to a conflict already present in the bid documents.
- For the same jobs, count the conflicts your estimators flagged in bid clarifications or qualifications.
- Divide the flagged count by the flagged count plus the tagged count.
In a pilot, run a tool like Kuro on the bid documents of those same jobs. Count how many of the tagged conflicts it flags, and how many of its flags were false alarms on review.
A first step this week is to pull the RFI log on one recently awarded job and tag the RFIs that came from conflicts in the bid set.
Availability and cost
Kuro’s website is in German, and the customers it names are in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: Goldbeck, Hochtief Infrastructure, Köster, Implenia, Geiger and Riedel. Kuro says it hosts project data in the EU and holds ISO 27001 certification. The platform reads data from and writes data back to Revit, IFC, iTWO, SharePoint and Office files.
Kuro sells by inquiry, through a contact address on its website. Availability for US contractors could not be verified.