News Update

With $36 million Series C, Brazil’s Ambar hopes to make civil construction more efficient

• ByStartupStory     |    December 24, 2021

Brazilian construction tech startup Ambar announced it has raised a large Series C round: R$204 million, approximately $36 million at today’s midmarket rate. The round was co-led by Brazil-based Echo Capital and Oria Capital, with participation from TPG Capital, Argonautic Ventures and others. Ambar was created in 2013 with the ambition to leverage technology to make the civil construction process more efficient. According to the company, it has raised R$360 million in equity funding to date. That’s some $100 million, CEO Bruno Balbinot estimated.

This $100 million figure is higher than the current equivalent of R$360 million in dollars, but the exchange rate has varied quite a bit over the years, so figuring out that number isn’t straightforward. And on the other hand, it doesn’t account for the fact that the company also raised venture debt.

Regardless of the exact tally, the gist is that Ambar now has a significant amount of capital to execute its plans. Talking to TechCrunch, Balbinot explained that the startup plans to use the proceeds to boost the digitization arm of its business, for which it sees a strong need across Latin America.

While Spanish-speaking Latin America is driving some of its revenue, it is Brazil where Ambar is most present, Balbinot said. The startup’s home country presents two advantages: It is the region’s largest market, and Brazilian Portuguese acts as a moat against competitors.

According to Ambar’s site, it has 467 active clients. Three of these are located in the U.S., but its presence there is more of a learning experiment, Balbinot told me. In contrast, it is currently present on 1,500 building sites across Brazil. Ambar has two sides to its business: Digitization, which it is now planning to boost further, and industrialization, which some media outlets have likened to Lego for the construction sector.

Ambar is not a general contractor, though. “Our angle is to partner with those who construct, and we will never construct,” Balbinot said in Portuguese. Rather than simply claiming that Ambar is a tech company, he backs it up with its unit economics, which are “much higher than in the construction sector.”

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