From a Wine Cellar to a16z in 18 Months

Eighteen months ago, four people were working in an unheated wine cellar in Stockholm with no lights. This month, one of them announced a $50 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the company to roughly $75 million raised since it started.

The company is Endra. What makes the story worth your Sunday is not the number. It is what the number was spent on: software that designs the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems inside buildings. The pipes, the wiring, the ducts, the fire alarms. The least glamorous work in one of the least glamorous industries on earth.

That is the whole point. Endra is a case study in a pattern most founders never run, because it requires being willing to build something deeply unsexy. So let us walk through how they did it, round by round, and what you can take from each step.

When an architect finishes the shell of a commercial building, the design goes to a specialist consultancy. Their job is to figure out where every pipe, wire, duct, and fixture goes, and to make sure all of it meets local building code. This is MEP design. It is the work that decides whether a building can actually breathe, light up, and stay safe.

It is also brutal. A skilled engineer manually places thousands of components onto a 3D model, choosing devices, calculating wattages and lumens, checking everything against regulation, floor by floor, room by room. For a single large building it can take three to nine months. Niklas Lindgren, Endra’s CEO, says his software can take a code-compliant electrical design for a 500,000 square foot building from two months down to less than a day.

Here is the line one early customer gave Andreessen Horowitz, and it is the whole pitch in one sentence: “Basically you could ride a horse with the legacy solution or go to the moon with Endra.”

Nothing has fundamentally changed in this software for 25 years. That is not a throwaway fact. It is the reason the company exists.

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You cannot understand Endra’s fundraising without understanding who built it.

Niklas Lindgren and his co-founder Anton Juric have been business partners since they were teenagers, when they started by selling hockey sticks. Their most recent company before Endra was Sectragon, a security firm that installed access control and intelligent CCTV systems. They sold it to a private equity firm in 2022.

The important detail is what they did inside Sectragon. They ran an in-house team of MEP designers. They watched skilled engineers lose weeks to antiquated tools, on project after project, and they paid the bill for it. Lindgren’s father, an architect, told him the same thing from the design side: the MEP step was always the bottleneck.

So when they sold Sectragon, they already knew exactly which workflow to attack. They were not founders who researched a market. They were founders who had owned the pain, at cost, for years. Then they paired themselves with two people who could build the cure: David Rydberg and Gustav Hammarlund, who had built trading systems together at Goldman Sachs and jumped when they understood the opportunity.

That pairing, an operator who lived the problem plus elite engineers who can solve it, is the quiet foundation under all three rounds.

Endra raised a 3 million euro pre-seed in May 2025, led by Norrsken VC. Look closely at the angels and you see the strategy. Maximilian Viessmann of Vito One. Johan Edenstrom of Newsec and Stronghold. Simon De Chateau of Alma Property Partners. The Hoglund brothers of Epidemic Sound.

These are not random startup angels. They are operators from real estate and property, the exact world Endra needs to sell into. At pre-seed, for a vertical company, that is worth more than any brand-name micro-fund. An angel who can open a customer door is doing a different job than an angel who adds a logo.

The product was not even live yet. Anton Juric framed the early traction the way you frame a category that is about to move: “We’re measuring productivity increases in multiples, not percentages.”

This is the part to underline, because it is the lesson most founders get backwards.

For the seed, Endra ran a real process. They spoke with, and ultimately declined, more than 150 funds. They chose Notion Capital. Here is why, in the founders’ own words:

“We had the opportunity to speak with, and ultimately decline, over 150 funds, but none matched the depth of preparation and conviction Notion brought to the table. Before we even met, they had conducted over 20 user interviews and came to us with thoughtful insights into our market and product.”

Sit with that. Before the first meeting, the fund had already interviewed twenty of Endra’s potential users.

A term sheet is cheap. It is easy to write and easy to walk back. Twenty customer interviews before a first meeting are expensive, voluntary, and impossible to fake. A fund that has already talked to your market has already done the diligence on the risk it is most likely to get cold feet about later. The pre-work is the conviction. The term sheet is just paperwork.

The round closed in December 2025 at $20 million, one of the largest seed rounds ever for a Swedish company, with Norrsken following on. By then Endra had launched its first customers in August and built a waiting list of more than 600 companies from over 90 countries. That waitlist did real fundraising work. It was proof of demand before there was meaningful revenue.

Notion’s own thesis is worth borrowing, because it is a textbook “why now.” Construction and real estate are 20 percent of global GDP and among the least digitised sectors on earth. The thing that changed is mundane and decisive: Revit and BIM, the 3D modelling tools launched in the early 2000s, only recently reached the adoption mass that produces a usable data layer across large projects. That data layer is what AI needs to work. As Notion put it, this “wasn’t the case merely 3 years ago.” Add a projected shortfall of a million engineers globally by 2030, and the timing argument writes itself.

Frozen for 25 years, plus a specific unlock that arrived in the last 24 months. That is a far stronger pitch than “AI is big.”

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In June 2026, a16z led the $50 million Series A, with Notion and Norrsken both doubling down. Andreessen even published a 2,500 word thesis with a title that says everything: “Every Building You’ve Ever Been In Was Designed By Software Built in 1997.”

Watch how the proof hardened across the three rounds. At pre-seed, the claim was a directional “70x.” At seed, it was “automate over 80 percent of design work, deliver complete designs in a day,” backed by the waitlist. At Series A, it was deployed evidence: a 100 percent pilot-to-paid conversion rate, a 12x efficiency gain even in the weakest use case, one UK project compressed from 10 weeks to 8 hours, and named customers among the largest engineering firms in the world, including AtkinsRealis, Buro Happold, Hoare Lea, Ramboll, and AFRY.

The same core claim, getting more specific and more externally verifiable each round. That is what a healthy company’s proof looks like over time, and it is something you can plan deliberately rather than stumble into.

Endra also did the thing strong companies do at the scale inflection: it hired adult go-to-market leadership, bringing in Marcus Holm, former President of LaunchDarkly, as CRO. You bring in the senior operator at the moment you start scaling, not a year after.

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Lindgren’s framing of the opportunity is the real headline. Today, engineering firms grow by hiring more engineers. He is betting they will grow by letting each engineer do far more, scaling through technology instead of headcount. Whether that fully plays out is an open question. But it is the kind of bet that resets an industry’s economics, and it is why a fund like a16z is willing to lead a round into a category most investors find boring.

For your own raise, four things travel cleanly out of this story.

Build from the company that contained your customer. The most defensible wedge is a workflow you personally owned and hated, not one you discovered in a market map.

Make a real why-now. Pair a category that has been frozen for decades with the specific capability that just crossed critical mass. Name the year it became possible.

Choose your lead by conviction, not by brand or by the last turn of valuation. Run a real process, then pick the partner who did the most work before you ever met. Pre-work is the only conviction signal that cannot be faked.

And do not be afraid of the boring industries. The unsexy, regulated, high-volume work that sits one layer below the categories everyone talks about is exactly where the incumbents have shipped nothing and the next generation of vertical companies will be built.

Four people. An unheated wine cellar. The most boring job in engineering. Eighteen months. That is not luck. It is a playbook.

The paid playbook for this edition breaks down all six frameworks, with the full replication checklist and the honest gaps, for subscribers. If you found this useful, the most helpful thing you can do is forward it to one founder who is about to raise.