Lebane’s $4M seed round bets on AI to fix Latin America’s construction chaos
It started in an elevator in Mexico City, of all places — two Argentine startup veterans swapping stories about the industry that builds the region’s skyline but still runs on spreadsheets. That chance meeting between Bruno Lerer and Lucas Glustman has now turned into Lebane, a Buenos Aires-based proptech that just closed a $4 million seed round to take its artificial intelligence platform deeper into Latin America, with Mexico as the bullseye. For anyone who watches where capital flows in South America, this is not just another funding blip; it’s a bet that the region’s most stubbornly analog sector is finally ready for a digital reckoning.
The round was co-led by Atlántico, a Brazilian tech-focused fund, and Zacua Ventures, a U.S. investor specializing in construction tech. Fen Ventures, ADN.vc, Kuiper VC, and Galicia Ventures — the venture arm of Argentina’s Banco Galicia — also chipped in. The company, founded in 2023 by Lerer, Glustman, Diego Sarro, Matías Podrojsky, and Diego Cabrosi, describes itself as an AI-native operating system for real estate developers and construction firms. It uses WhatsApp as a front door: teams can query the system, get recommendations, and track financial control in natural language, powered by models like OpenAI, Mistral, and Claude. The pitch is simple: give developers real-time visibility into budgets, timelines, and cash flow, something that most still manage through a patchwork of disconnected tools.
To understand why this matters, you need to know the pain. Cabrosi, one of the co-founders, puts it bluntly: he ran a development company for years without fine control, with numbers arriving late and deviations spotted only when they were too expensive to fix. That’s not an exception; it’s the norm across Latin America. Lebane’s own data shows construction budgets can blow out by 35% to 50%, and operational inefficiencies eat up 10% to 15% of a project’s value — millions of dollars lost to what is essentially a data problem. The region’s construction industry generates more than $700 billion a year and contributes nearly 6% of GDP, yet it remains one of the least digitized sectors. In a time of housing crises, soaring material costs, and expensive financing, developers can no longer afford to fly blind.
This funding round also signals a broader shift in South American venture capital. Lebane is riding a wave of Argentine startups pulling in serious checks — Pomelo raised $55 million in Series C, Tapi $27 million in Series B, both in fintech. But Lebane is different: it’s not moving money faster; it’s trying to make the physical economy smarter. The company started with a mission to digitize real estate information flows, but with this investment, it’s evolving into financial products — loans, payment tracking, and collection automation. That’s a natural pivot, because once you have clean data on a project’s financial health, you can start to offer credit or manage payments with far more confidence than a bank ever could. For a region where construction financing is notoriously expensive and opaque, that could be a game-changer.
For international readers, the takeaway is this: South America’s tech boom is no longer just about neobanks and delivery apps. The next frontier is the built environment, and the capital is following. Lebane’s founders have the right pedigree — Glustman sold his last company to dLocal, a payments unicorn that went public on Nasdaq, so he knows how to scale. But the real test will be in Mexico, where the company’s story began and where the market is fragmented enough to reward a tool that brings order to chaos. If Lebane can prove that AI can cut waste and boost profitability for developers, it won’t just be another startup success story; it’ll be a template for how to modernize the industry that literally builds the region’s future.
