Argentine company Lebane closes $4 million funding round; seeks to consolidate its expansion in Mexico

Lebane, an intelligent system for real estate and construction development powered by artificial intelligence (AI), closed a seed round for US$4 million, co-led by Atlántico, a Brazilian fund focused on technology, and Zacua Ventures, a U.S. fund specializing in technologies for the construction industry. 

Fen Ventures, ADN.vc, Kuiper VC, and Galicia Ventures, the venture capital arm of Banco Galicia, are other notable funds that also participated in the round for this Argentine startup, which operates as a quantitative and qualitative smart construction assistant for real estate development and construction. The goal of this capital raise is to accelerate its expansion in Latin America, with a special focus on the Mexican market.

The investment comes at a time when other Argentine startups are also receiving large venture capital checks, such as Pomelo, which raised US$55 million in Series C funding, and Tapi, which raised US$27 million in Series B funding, both in the fintech industry.

The company, founded in 2023 by startup experts Bruno Lerer, Lucas Glustman, Diego Sarro, Matías Podrojsky, and Diego Cabrosi, is a proptech that started with the mission of digitizing information and process flows in the real estate industry. However, with this investment, it will evolve its offering towards financial products, such as loans, payment tracking services, and collection automation.

A proptech company that maximizes profitability

Glustman explains that they found that most real estate developers and construction companies throughout Latin America did not have access to centralized information in real time. “They had multiple Excel spreadsheets, multiple systems, multiple forms, multiple sources of information that were not consolidated, and that basically prevented them from making decisions,” he explains.

The lack of reliable information leads to economic losses and is one of the main risks to the profitability of real estate projects. According to data revealed by Lebane, construction budgets can deviate by between 35% and 50%, and operational inefficiencies can represent between 10% and 15% of the total business, which translates into millions of dollars lost.

Lebane’s goal is to maximize the profitability of a multi-million dollar industry. “Construction is one of the largest industries in Latin America—contributing nearly 6% of regional GDP and generating more than US$700 billion a year—but it is also one of the least digitized. It continues to operate with manual processes in a context of housing crisis, cost pressures, and increasingly expensive financing. In this scenario, developers can no longer manage projects blindly: they need financial visibility and real-time control. That’s where Lebane comes in as a technology partner,” adds Bruno Lerer, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer.

Diego Cabrosi, another of the co-founders, says he has suffered the consequences of working in a non-digitized industry. “For years, it hurt me to operate a development company without fine control of the business: the numbers arrived late, deviations were detected when it was already too expensive to correct them, and decisions were made more by intuition than by data,” he says.

That is why Lebane created a solution tailored to the real needs of the industry: its proposal is an intelligent operating system for developers and construction companies that, through WhatsApp and using AI, assists teams in the company’s main operations, from planning and execution to financial control of the works.

The main difference with Lebane lies in its core technology, explain the company’s incubators. Unlike other traditional solutions and ERPs, Lebane is AI Native: the platform was designed to be directly integrated with tools such as Open AI, Mistral, and Claude. Thanks to this, users can operate the system, make queries, and even receive recommendations via WhatsApp, using a natural language system that is trained with each developer’s own data.

Startup and focus on Mexico

The entrepreneurs shared that the idea for Lebane began in an elevator in Mexico City, where Lerer and Glustman met. Both had experience in the startup world: Lerer in the fintech industry and Glustman had sold his last company to the management of dLocal (achieving a valuation of more than US$10 billion), whom he then accompanied in their IPO on Nasdaq, so they decided to take on their next challenge together. They then put together a team of founders with experience in real estate and startups to launch in Argentina.

The founding team boasts that since its inception, Lebane has grown 20x rapidly, as the company went from having a portfolio of 10 clients in March 2023 to more than 100 in its first year.

In early 2025, Lebane began operations in Mexico, with Roberto Esses as its leader, who brings to the startup 15 years of experience in the real estate world and managing technology companies such as Inmuebles24, Gympass, and Vivanuncios – eBay.

Following the investment, the goal is to double its presence in Mexico and continue the rapid growth of the last year.

Esses highlights that Lebane’s business opportunity in the country is significant, considering that there are around 70,000 companies dedicated to the construction industry, ranging from real estate developers to material suppliers, according to the Mexican Ministry of Economy.

The executive adds that “90% of real estate developers and construction companies in Mexico use Excel to operate; we are talking about projects worth billions of pesos or dollars, and they operate them in Excel, 95% of which have errors in formulas, which can lead to extra payments or budget deviations.”

Lebane currently has a team of 45 employees, is present in Argentina and Mexico, and has more than 300 clients (60 of which are in Mexico), including firms such as C-Urbano, Minimax, Urban Capital, Concoord, Briko, and Constructora Fasa.