Pillar raises €12M to give construction contractors a single operating system
European construction accounts for around 9% of EU GDP, yet it has ranked last on the McKinsey Global Institute's digitisation index for Europe for nearly a decade. According to McKinsey's analysis, productivity in the sector increased by only 0.4% per year between 2000 and 2024, compared to 2% across the entire economy and 3% in manufacturing. The root cause is structural: most contractors manage projects using disconnected spreadsheets and accounting portals, and have no unified view of cash flow, workforce costs, or margin per site.
Founded in Milan in 2025 by Gabriel Guinea Montalvo, Paolo Tarsia Incuria and Lorenzo Demaio, Pillar is developing an AI-powered operating system for construction contractors. The platform connects accounting software, bank feeds and on-site channels, and uses AI models to extract structured records from delivery notes and site reports. It then reconciles transactions and identifies margin discrepancies, updating project status in real time without requiring contractors to change their current workflows.
Pillar has recently raised €12 million in a seed round co-led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Base10 Partners, with participation from Italian Founders Fund and existing investor Emblem. Total funding now stands at €15.2 million, less than eight months after the public launch. The capital will fund expansion across Europe and Latin America, and develop new modules covering procurement, tender management, subcontractor coordination and banking.
McKinsey estimates that closing the productivity gap in the construction sector could add $1.6 trillion to its annual global value. However, less than a quarter of construction firms have matched broader economic productivity growth over the past decade. Pillar's bet is that the bottleneck is not willingness to change but the absence of a single platform that reads how contractors already work and makes that data useful in real time.
Founders: Gabriel Guinea Montalvo, Paolo Tarsia Incuria, Lorenzo Demaio