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In July 2021, they were champions of Spain in the Entrepreneurship World Cup. Now, they confirm with all of the law that global vocation: the startup of Malaga origin Checktobuild He has put all the meat on the grill with his landing in the United States. There, it has a presence in New York, California, Texas and —above all— Florida; where they have found a market more adapted to their proposal.
This technological company is dedicated to the autonomous supervision of works, so they need a market in which construction is sufficiently digitized. In the United States, 38% of projects today already use solutions of this type in some of their construction phases and their use has grown by 400% in the last 5 years. Thus, there Checktobuild has managed to reduce its sales cycle (from the first contact with the customer to the first billing) from between 2 and 4 months in Spain to a maximum of 3 weeks in the North American country.
“What we are looking for is for architects to work on 3D models. If they have that, that’s fine. In the United States, we identified that the main contractors have a virtual design department dedicated to buying technology like ours, and thus we found our place in a super-large market in which we don’t have to evangelize”, he explains in conversation with EL ESPAÑOL from Malaga Checktobuild’s CEO, Alejandro Ruiz Lara: “Spain is a very good construction country, but it still does not have such a technological level to make our startup scalable.”
[Así es la ‘startup’ malagueña que representó en 2021 a España en la Copa Mundial del Emprendimiento]
They have already signed a contract with one of the largest general builders in Florida, Moss Construction, and calculate that the market reaches up to a trillion dollars annually. They have doubled their turnover in six months: they are currently around $100,000 per yearaccording to data provided by the company.
Not a bad milestone for a company that was born just in May 2020, when the confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging, in Malaga. The Andalusian Entrepreneurship Center (CADE) in Marbella gave them an office and the following year they managed to win that national competition of the Entrepreneurship World Cup.
“In 2021 we generated a lot of impact and brand, but what we already had was a business objective,” recalls Ruiz Lara. In October of that year they already had their first scalable product and, for a month and a half, they already have their guaranteed patent in Spain and other countries of the world. His is a deep technology tool that is applied to construction: “We automate construction control with an artificial intelligence system; we see what is going well, what is going wrong and how much has been built“, explains the CEO of Checktobuild.
Once the tool was developed, they decided to carry out sales experimentation in seven countries in which to measure who the customer was and how they could help them: Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States. “In February, evaluating data, we saw that the best sales cycle and the most prepared market is the United Kingdom and the United States“, says Alejandro Ruiz.
Alejandro Ruiz is the founder and CEO of Checktobuild.
In February 2022 they began to visit the North American country and just in the first weeks they already closed that great contract with Moss Constructor. In May they officially opened in Miami; but They maintain the marketing team in Madrid and the engineers in Malaga, although most of the sales team is in the US.”I want to create value in Spain and we have enough talent”, he affirms. There are currently eight workers and they estimate that in the coming months there should be 12.
“We are finishing the last product milestones; as soon as that period passes, I will raise a much larger investment round again and we will scale a lot in number,” says Ruiz Lara. In this transition period, they are with a seed round of 1.5 million eurosbut calculate that in the next 12 months they will already be with a round… This time, A league.
ensures that in a startup like yours from deep tech or deep tech, “market development time and scalability is slower.” However, once these two rounds are closed, Ruiz Lara explains that they are going to seek to be “capital efficient”: “We don’t want to be a startup to raise rounds”.
“We have not yet managed to succeed. We are making our way and our path, to be successful, goes through looking for the market abroad. It draws attention because our pulse has not trembled, but we have thought it through and tested it. I see a lot of talent in Malaga, there are so many that are doing very well… When the time comes for them to internationalize, their pulse will not tremble either”, analyzes the CEO of Checktobuild about his relationship with the technological ecosystem of the Costa del Sun.
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They have achieved all this only with a first pre-seed round of 450,000 euros and ensures that, For every euro invested, your investors have already multiplied by 10. If their tool well has an annual fee of about $12,000 per project per year, they have also released a free version with a small part of their solution to build a community around it.
“Anyone who can generate or view a 3D model of a building can do so in our version. We want, in everything that has to do with construction management, Checktobuild comes to the fore“, sentence Ruiz Lara.
