A construction schedule is a living document, but it’s often trapped in a dead format. It starts as a Gantt chart in Microsoft Project, gets exported to Excel for the subcontractors, and then fragments into dozens of PDFs and WhatsApp threads. By week two, no one is looking at the same version. Koppla’s bet is that this coordination failure, not a lack of materials or labor, is the primary source of delay and cost overruns on a job site. The Potsdam-based startup sells a cloud-based scheduling platform designed to be the single source of truth for every contractor on a project, updated in real time.
The wedge of real-time coordination
Koppla’s product is not a full-blown project management suite with billing and inventory modules. Its wedge is the schedule itself. The platform provides a collaborative, visual timeline where general contractors can plan phases and subcontractors can update their progress, flag delays, and communicate dependencies. The intent is to create process stability, a concept borrowed from lean manufacturing, by making the plan transparent and mutable for all stakeholders. For an industry still deeply reliant on spreadsheets and legacy desktop software, this represents a shift from document-centric to data-centric planning. The company reports its software is now used on more than 600 projects [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF, May 2025].
From university project to venture-backed scale
The company’s origins are academic. It began as a bachelor project at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in collaboration with the University of Potsdam, later receiving an EXIST founder grant [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. The founding trio,CEO Jérôme Lange, COO Marco Trippler, and CTO Lasse Steffen,combined startup ambition, construction industry expertise, and technical development from HPI. This foundation helped secure early backing from the HPI Seed Fund and a €1.6 million seed round in 2021 led by Earlybird Venture Capital [tech.eu, October 2021]. The recent €6 million Series A in May 2025, led by Dutch B2B investor Newion, signals a push to scale the platform and expand its market reach [Hasso Plattner Institute, May 2025].
2021 Seed | 1.6 | M EUR
2025 Series A | 6 | M EUR
Traction with German construction leaders
Koppla’s growth is evidenced by its customer roster, which includes several established German construction and real estate firms. Publicly named clients range from large developers like Instone Real Estate to major contractors such as Implenia and Leonhard Weiss [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. Landing these customers required more than a slick interface; it demanded a tool reliable enough for complex, multi-year projects and intuitive enough for on-site foremen to adopt. The company has scaled to approximately 50 employees to support this growth.
| Founder | Role | Background Anchor |
|---|---|---|
| Jérôme Lange | CEO | Startup experience, business development |
| Marco Trippler | COO | Construction industry expertise |
| Lasse Steffen | CTO | HPI alumnus, technical development |
The technical breakdown and scale risks
The platform’s core technical challenge is managing low-latency updates across a potentially large number of concurrent users on a single project timeline, while maintaining a complete audit trail. For subcontractors often working with limited connectivity on-site, the system must also handle offline scenarios gracefully. Koppla’s cloud-native approach centralizes data, but the real test comes with complexity. A simple residential build has a few dozen tasks; a large commercial project can have thousands, with intricate dependencies. The platform’s performance and stability under that load, with dozens of firms making real-time changes, is the unglamorous infrastructure hurdle that will determine its enterprise readiness.
The most credible risk is not competition from other startups, but from the entrenched workflows themselves. Microsoft Project and Excel are free in the sense that they are already purchased and understood. Convincing a project manager to migrate a live, critical schedule to a new system mid-construction is a high-stakes ask. Koppla’s answer has been to focus on the collaborative pain point that legacy tools simply cannot address, positioning its product as the necessary connective tissue rather than just a better Gantt chart. The Series A capital is likely earmarked for deepening integrations with other construction software and building out features that lock in this collaborative workflow, making reversion to spreadsheets increasingly impractical.
What to watch in the next build phase
The next twelve months will be about proving the platform’s value beyond initial project adoption. Key milestones will be public case studies demonstrating quantifiable reductions in project delays or cost overruns, and expansion into adjacent European markets. The company is also hiring for roles like a Founders Associate focused on strategy and GTM, indicating a focus on refining its sales motion [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. For an industry notorious for its slow digitization, Koppla’s progress on 600 projects shows a wedge that is sticking. The sober assessment is that the hard part is just beginning: moving from a useful scheduling tool to the indispensable operating system for the construction site.
Sources
- [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF, May 2025] Koppla product and traction overview
- [tech.eu, October 2021] Making construction sites faster, cheaper, and more sustainable, koppla raises €1.6 million | https://tech.eu/2021/10/14/making-construction-sites-faster-cheaper-and-more-sustainable-koppla-raises-e1-6-million/
- [Hasso Plattner Institute, May 2025] Startup von HPI-Alumus sammelt sechs Millionen Euro ein | https://hpi.de/artikel/hpi-startup-koppla-sammelt-sechs-millionen-euro-ein/
- [9] Company profile and team data
- [Deutsche Startups, June 2025] Uns hat es als Team stärker zusammengeschweißt | https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2025/06/24/uns-hat-es-als-team-staerker-zusammengeschweisst/