Sitegeist, a Munich-based construction robotics startup, has raised €4 million in a pre-seed funding round. The funding will enable Sitegeist to rapidly expand its team, hiring and scale the deployment of its automated, AI-enabled robots on real-world construction sites, helping concrete renovation companies overcome acute capacity constraints.
Automated robots for unstructured, real-world construction sites
Across Europe, aging bridges, tunnels, parking structures, and public buildings urgently require renovation. In Germany alone, the infrastructure repair backlog totals hundreds of billions of euros (KfW, 2025), with similar challenges across North America and beyond.
At the same time, a severe labor shortage is slowing progress: physically demanding tasks such as concrete renovation are costly, hard to staff, and difficult to scale.
Unlike conventional automation approaches that rely on pre-existing 3D models or standardized site conditions, Sitegeist’s automated robots operate directly on existing structures.
Using advanced perception, AI-based decision support, and adaptive control, they can handle complex geometries and varying material conditions without prior digitization, enabling immediate deployment on real-world renovation sites.
Dr Lena-Marie Pätzmann, co-founder and CEO of Sitegeist (main picture, second from right), says: “Infrastructure renovation is hitting a critical bottleneck, especially in concrete repair. Today, deteriorated concrete is still removed using manually-intensive processes that are hard to scale.
“We’re tackling this challenge with the first ever specialized automated and modular robots that can perform concrete renovation directly on existing structures. We’re thrilled to have won such renowned investors who share our mission. This backing enables us to move faster in bringing automated renovation to critical infrastructure worldwide.”
Scaling concrete renovation capacity
Concrete renovation is a particularly complex and capacity-constrained segment of infrastructure maintenance. To repair damaged structures, deteriorated concrete must be selectively removed using high-pressure water or abrasive blasting, a process that requires precision, experience, and constant supervision to avoid damaging the steel reinforcement underneath.
Today, this work is largely manual and highly site-specific. Driven by shortages of qualified labor, low efficiency, and increasing safety requirements, construction companies are unable to meet strong demand and are often fully booked months or even years in advance, leading to significant project backlogs.
Sitegeist addresses these challenges with modular, automated robots purpose-built for unstructured construction environments. This significantly increases throughput and quality while reducing rework.
Sitegeist works directly with concrete renovation construction companies on site, with a modular platform designed to expand across the renovation value chain over time.
Going forward, the company aims to collaborate with additional test sites, co-development partners, and talent to further validate and refine its robots.
Florian Schweitzer, partner at b2venture, says: “The way concrete is removed today by workers is devastating and extremely arduous. This is the perfect case for augmenting humans with robots.
“What sets Sitegeist apart is its team, which will literally go through walls to bring autonomy into highly unstructured, real-world construction environments. The team combines deep robotics expertise with a pragmatic understanding of how renovation actually works on site, which gives them the potential to define this category.”
Sam Hields, partner at OpenOcean, says: “The most exciting AI-powered robots today don’t have fingers and thumbs.
“Sitegeist’s non-humanoid robots are purpose-built to solve real-world problems, and their ability to operate in harsh environments with superhuman strength and autonomy is genuinely game-changing.
“This is exactly the kind of task we want AI to automate: a manual, expensive process with low talent availability. With an aging population and a skills shortage in physical industries like construction, robotics will help us refit our infrastructure for the future – and TUM and Munich have proven this is the one of the best places to build teams to do it.”
Sitegeist is a spin-out from Technical University Munich (TUM) originating from a renowned robotics research institute led by Prof. Matthias Althoff.
Sitegeist was founded by Dr Lena-Marie Pätzmann from the University of St. Gallen as well as Claus Carste, Julian Hoffmann and Nicola Kolb, who met at TUM during their studies and through the Munich Startup ecosystem.
