Berlin-based ecoworks, a company focusing on the cost-efficient decarbonisation of Europe’s residential building stock, has received €23 million to deliver Germany’s largest cooperative serial renovation to date.
In the city of Hagen in Northrhein Westfalia, twelve residential buildings will undergo comprehensive energy-efficiency upgrades through serial renovation. The goal is to bring all 192 apartments up to KfW Efficiency House 55 standard (EH 55) and achieve carbon-neutral building operations on a net basis.
“This flagship project involving twelve buildings demonstrates the enormous potential of serial renovation for decarbonising the existing building stock. Our extremely high degree of prefabrication makes an efficient, fast and carbon-neutral transformation of the housing sector scalable. Together with Wohnungsverein Hagen, we are once again proving that entire neighbourhoods can be energy-renovated serially in record time,” says Emanuel Heisenberg, founder and CEO, ecoworks.
Comparable activity reported by EU-Startups in 2025–2026 includes Enter, another Berlin-based company, which raised €20 million to scale its end-to-end renovation platform, and WALLROUND, also from Berlin, which secured €4.2 million to digitise renovation workflows – highlighting a notable concentration of activity in Germany.
Elsewhere, ECAIR in Paris raised €11 million to expand financing solutions for solar and home renovation projects, Optimuse in Vienna secured €4 million to develop AI-driven building engineering tools, and Renno in Amsterdam raised €1 million to address cash flow challenges in construction and renovation.
Together, these rounds amount to over €40 million, or around €63 million including ecoworks, indicating steady capital deployment across complementary layers of the renovation ecosystem – from execution platforms to financing and engineering software.
Within this context, ecoworks’ funding stands out for its focus on industrialised, serial renovation at neighbourhood scale, aligning with a broader shift towards solutions capable of accelerating retrofit rates across Europe’s ageing building stock.
EU-Startups covered ecoworks back in 2023, when the company announced €40 million to reduce built environment emissions with AI digital planning solution.
“Energy-efficient modernisation is the key to a carbon-neutral building stock. With serial renovation through ecoworks, we are consistently implementing our sustainability strategy in the Helfe neighbourhood. This future-proofs our portfolio and meaningfully reduces both CO₂ emissions and heating costs for our tenants.” adds Sebastian Greese, Managing Director, Wohnungsverein Hagen eG.
Founded in 2019, ecoworks is a renovation technology company specializing in AI-powered planning, digital twins and industrial prefabrication for residential buildings. With more than 130 engineers, architects and digital experts, ecoworks enables climate-neutral renovations at scale. Its mission is to save one gigaton of CO₂ by 2045.
According to the company, around 75% of residential buildings in Germany are in need of energy renovation, and the current renovation rate is below one percent per year. Serial renovation can allegedly significantly increase the renovation rate, reduce costs, and make sufficient affordable housing available more quickly.
The twelve buildings, constructed in 1966, cover approximately 15,000 square metres of residential floor space. As part of the serial renovation, building components such as facade elements will be industrially prefabricated. This dramatically reduces on-site construction time and significantly minimises disruption for tenants in occupied buildings.
The serial renovation measures in detail:
- Thermal building envelope: The buildings receive industrially prefabricated timber-frame facade modules. Insulation, windows and electric roller shutters are integrated ex-factory.
- Roof & PV installation: The flat roofs are re-insulated and sealed. A high-performance photovoltaic system feeds all generated electricity into the grid.
- Living comfort: Significantly larger covered balconies replace the existing loggias.
- Building services: The central district heating supply is retained. Decentralised exhaust fans and air inlets in the windows ensure optimal indoor climate.
Final energy demand for the project is expected to fall by 36%. Through the serial renovation of the building envelope combined with local electricity generation via PV systems, approximately 190 tonnes of CO₂ emissions will be saved across the entire neighbourhood annually.
The company hopes that the Helfe neighbourhood will become a model project for carbon-neutral building operations – demonstrating that the German government’s ambitious climate targets for the building sector can be achieved economically through industrial renovation methods, including in the cooperative housing sector.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/03/e23-million-backs-ecoworks-in-rolling-out-germanys-largest-serial-building-renovation/
