Scalera

Scalera is an ETH Zurich spin-off revolutionizing construction tendering through AI-powered automation, enabling contractors and suppliers to transform the tender-to-offer process from hours to seconds.
As Founder and CEO, my role is to build Europe's leading construction technology platform while assembling world-class engineering talent to help the construction industry build faster and more efficiently.
Key Responsibilities:

- Setting vision and strategy for AI-driven construction innovation
- Leading fundraising efforts and managing investor relations
- Building and nurturing a diverse team of 20+ including former Google and Yandex engineers
- Driving expansion from Swiss market dominance to DACH-wide growth
- Maintaining direct customer relationships to ensure product-market fit

Achievements/Results:

- Raised $6.5M in pre-seed/seed funding despite two YC rejections
- Scaled to 110+ B2B customers within 18 months of launch
- Processed over €8 billion in tender volume with 65% market penetration in Switzerland
- Recruited world-class team including ETH CS PhDs and engineers from Google, Yandex
- Secured partnerships with industry leaders and angel investors including Slack's founder

Ready to revolutionize your construction tendering process? Book a demo at scalera.ai or connect with me on LinkedIn.

CEO & Co-Founder

InClub

InClub was a B2C social platform connecting people with similar passions through IRL experiences, reaching over 15,000 users before its acquisition.

As Co-Founder, my role was to build and scale a consumer social platform from concept to successful exit, including pitching on Switzerland's Shark Tank ("Die Höhle der Löwen").

Key Responsibilities:

- Product development and user experience optimization
- Securing investment from 4 out of 5 sharks on national television
- Building partnerships and managing investor relations
- Leading marketing initiatives and community growth
- Managing technical development with remote teams

Achievements/Results:

- Grew platform to 15,000+ active users within 3 years
- Successfully pitched and won investment on Shark Tank Switzerland
- Featured in multiple national newspapers and media outlets
- Built and managed distributed team across multiple countries
- Learned invaluable lessons about B2C dynamics that now inform B2B strategy

Startup Co-Founder InClub AG

Plug and Play Tech Center

Plug and Play Tech Center is a global innovation platform connecting startups, corporations, and investors across 40+ locations worldwide.

As an Investment Intern, I analyzed early-stage startups for potential investment and accelerator programs, gaining crucial insights into what makes startups succeed or fail.

Key Responsibilities:

- Evaluating 50+ startups per week across various verticals
- Conducting due diligence and market analysis
- Supporting portfolio companies with strategic advice
- Connecting startups with corporate partners and investors

Achievements/Results:

- Analyzed early-stage, Pre-Seed to Series B startups in specific verticals
- Built expertise in investment proposal analysis and decision-making
- Developed skills in brainstorming solutions during bottlenecks
- Created network connections that continue to benefit my entrepreneurial journey

Investment Intern

Notariat, Grundbuch und Konkursamt Stäfa

The Swiss notary system handles critical legal documentation for real estate transactions, company formations, and official certifications.

As a Notary Public, I gained deep insights into legal structures and bureaucratic inefficiencies that would later inspire my entrepreneurial journey.

Key Responsibilities:

- Processing real estate transactions and land registry updates
- Managing company incorporation documents
- Ensuring legal compliance for complex transactions
- Direct client interaction with construction and real estate companies

Achievements/Results:

- Completed comprehensive 3-year vocational training in Swiss legal system
- Gained expertise in company formation and legal structures
- Identified massive inefficiencies in construction/real estate documentation
- Built foundation for understanding the pain points I now solve at Scalera

This experience taught me that the construction industry was desperate for digital transformation - a realization that eventually led to founding Scalera.

Notariatsangestellter 

I'm on a mission to revolutionize Europe's construction industry - making it faster, smarter, and more efficient through AI.

At 20, I took the leap into entrepreneurship, starting with event management (our first event drew 1,200 people!), then building a social platform that reached 15,000 users and caught the attention of Shark Tank Switzerland.

But it was construction that captured my imagination. Walking through Zurich and seeing buildings rise from the ground, I knew this industry - with $130B+ TAM - was ready for transformation.

Today at Scalera, we're making that vision reality. Our AI platform has already processed over €8 billion in tender volume, serving 110+ companies across DACH. Backed by Speedinvest and Firstminute Capital ($1.5B+ AUM), and 150+ Unicorn Founders, we've achieved 65% market penetration in Switzerland alone. With a world-class team including former Google and ETH engineers, we're turning a process that takes hours into one that takes seconds.

What drives me? Every building I pass in Zurich might have materials that went through our platform. That's the impact I'm after - not just software in the cloud, but real infrastructure you can see and touch.

Ready to build faster? Let's transform your tendering process together.

→ Book a demo at scalera.ai
→ Connect with me to discuss the future of construction tech
→ Join our team if you're a top engineer ready to build Europe's future

P.S. Still a doer at heart - I believe in taking action over endless planning. Let's build something great together.

Leonard Reinhard

For 4 years I worked full-time while studying for my bachelor’s degree on Saturdays. Looking back, it was the most disciplined period of my life.

At that time, InClub wasn’t generating revenue yet.

We had articles written about us, but not much traction. I wanted to use the period productively and develop myself while we were figuring things out.

So I structured my entire life around making it work:

• 5 AM wake-up every morning
• 1 hour of focused study before work
• 45-minute boat commute from Küsnacht to Thalwil
• Full workday until 6-7 PM to catch the last boat home
• Never missed a Saturday class
• Never missed an hour of work

I did this for 2 years straight during our toughest phase, when we were pivoting from InClub, shutting down consulting, and going all-in on Scalera.

The gym was part of the structure too.

In 2023, even with this schedule, I trained six days a week.

At some point, the discipline became a flow. I would wake up automatically at 5 AM. If I didn’t train, it felt wrong.

That consistency also shaped how Scalera operates today.

In our old office, everyone sat in one room.

You could hear the sales team calling all day. You could feel the tension. Everyone was putting the reps in.

That’s the culture we built: act fast, stay disciplined, stay focused.

When I finished my degree in May, I considered doing a master’s. Instead, I decided to go all in on Scalera, and that determination grows stronger. Day. By. Day. 

But I’m grateful for that period.

It showed me that if you structure your days well and stay consistent, things that look impossible become doable.

And that discipline is now part of how we build Scalera.

Making Construction Tendering 10x Faster Through AI | €8B+ Tender Volume Processed | Founder @ Scalera (ETH Spin-off) | Scaling from DACH to Europe

Last week was my first time at Slush, and it ended up being a lot more eventful than I expected. The theme this year was “Welcome to Hel-sinki”. They really leaned into the joke. 

It was my second time in Helsinki, but my first time at Slush, and what surprised me most was how many founders from Switzerland I ran into.

• Jan Schnyder (Nunu .ai)
• Lukas Steiner (Arcium)
• Quirin Hasler (Refluenced)
• Pascal Weber (Manukai)
• Stefan Rau (ChessLine)

It almost felt like a Zurich meetup inside Europe’s biggest investor conference.

For context: Slush is the major investor conference in Europe.

Startups, scale-ups, investors, ecosystem partners - everyone is there. 

You get a startup ticket, scale-up ticket, investor ticket, or ecosystem ticket (think Stripe, Siemens, etc.), and the whole event is organized around back-to-back 1:1 meetings.

And those meeting rooms… it's just endless tables, every one of them booked. I was fully booked for the entire event - back-to-back meetings all day.

A funny moment:

A friend of mine, Lukas, ended up talking to another founder working on a hardware compression startup, and now he’s considering making an investment. What started as a quick chat turned into a real angel conversation.

But the most important takeaway for me was the investor perception of Scalera.

Across two days, I got to speak with almost all the S-tier funds relevant to our space.

And I was invited to the private investor lounges, the two-floor area where only the top funds host meetings - Thanks, again, Northzone, for the first invite. Dominik Esen 

Before Slush even officially kicked off, our investors (First Minute) hosted a joint pre-party called Day 0 with Creandum. That alone was one of my highlights.

And later that day, Kelly Kung at Accel invited me backstage in their tent, which felt a bit like being treated as a rockstar in Helsinki.

Overall, the few days made something clear: Scalera is resonating externally just as strongly as it is internally, and we’re solving a real problem in a market most people underestimate.

And reconnecting with other Swiss founders there reminded me: Switzerland is just the starting point. European construction is where the real opportunity is. And I’m really proud of the ETH ecosystem.

There’s real momentum, real interest, and a market that’s finally ready for the kind of change our team is building toward.

We tested OCR solutions from startups that raised $100M+. Our in-house solution, built as a byproduct, outperformed them all (Kudos to our tech team). Here's what happened:

Scalera needs to extract data from construction tender documents. 

These aren't clean PDFs. 

These documents are messy, inconsistent, and every position can have its own context, unit, and formatting. 

For example, quantities might be in cubic meters, tons, or units, and they can appear anywhere in the document.

So we tested external OCR solutions first, hoping to avoid building this ourselves.

We tried tools from companies like Reducto (backed by a16z, over $100M raised) and Unstract (backed by Lightspeed). 

They handle OCR for sectors like healthcare and finance. We hoped we could simply use them instead of building our own.

But they couldn’t read tender files accurately enough.

The problem isn't technology in general. 

It's the specific complexity of construction documents:

• Context matters → A concrete specification on page 1 affects how you read page 100.
• Quantities appear anywhere → Cubic meters, tons, units, all scattered across varying formats.
• No standardization → Every architect and contractor formats documents differently.

Algorithmically, this is extremely hard.

So our engineering team built the capability internally.

We developed rules for interpreting context across pages, and bounding boxes to reliably locate quantities, even when they appear in different places every time.

It took heavy engineering work, but it now handles the files we work with every day.

What’s interesting is that OCR is the entire product for some of these companies. For us, it’s just something we needed in order to automate tenders properly.

They’re not competitors. In fact, we’d prefer if we could just use their tools.
But since they don’t yet support construction, we can stick to our solution for now.

Recently, Sven (our co-founder) and Markus Breu (Zindel Group) presented what Scalera delivers in front of 200 people. The results he shared:

1. Group-wide rollout across the entire Zindel Group
2. 80% reduction in technical office workload for supplier and subcontractor coordination
3. Significantly better quote quality through clearer requests from the technical office – faster turnaround included

What surprised me most was the questions came from managing directors and sales leaders who know that skilled labor shortage isn't a problem you solve with job postings anymore.

Here's the truth nobody likes to say out loud: AI simply expands the team’s capacity for real value creation.

When your technical office spends 80% less time on coordination, what do they do instead?

• They advise customers
• They optimize calculations
• They win the projects that actually matter

It was a wonderful experience validating the reason we built Scalera, and I hope to see more at next year's conference.

Until then: Those who don't automate today will lose due to their own inefficiency.

At Scalera, we have a mannequin in the office named Bob dressed as a construction contractor, and Bob’s job is simple:

To remind everyone that we're building for users, not for ourselves.

When engineers debate features or prioritize the roadmap, I point to Bob. 

"Did you talk to him about this?" 

If not, it's time to schedule customer calls.

It's a humorous approach, but it reinforces one of our core values: talk to users.

That value isn't just a poster on the wall. It's built into how we evaluate every team member at Scalera.

We benchmark employees across multiple dimensions:

• Problem-solving skills
• Communication effectiveness  
• Speed of execution (pragmatic action over endless deliberation)
• Client interactions (how well they understand and respond to customer needs)

If you want to grow here, these values matter. It’s how we evaluate whether someone is truly a Scalerian.
_____

Right now, we're hiring backend engineers.

Technical stack:

• Python (backend)
• React + Next.js (frontend)
• Terraform, OpenAI, GCP across the stack

But technical skills alone aren’t enough.

We want engineers with strong communication skills who are willing to talk to customers, understand their pain, and turn that into product decisions.

That’s why the mannequin stays.

It’s a simple way to reinforce a simple value: Talk to users.

If that sounds like you, we’re hiring in Zurich (or willing to relocate).

taplio