They Told Him VCs Don't Fund Consulting. He Raised €10M Anyway

Picture a commercial property portfolio that was worth a billion euros a few years ago. Same buildings, same tenants, same rent roll. Today it is worth less, and not because anything physical changed. What changed is that the banks started reading the energy-efficiency class.

Robin Behlau, co-CEO of Berlin’s Fuchs & Eule, tells the story plainly on the Startup Insider podcast: a portfolio “that was worth a billion a few years ago has lost value if it had a poor energy-efficiency class, because that has reached the banks, and it affects the lending value of the property.” A worse class means a lower Beleihungswert, which means less credit, higher rates, and a bank that would rather not hold the asset at all under its own ESG rules. Multiply that across a portfolio and the number gets large fast.

That single shift, energy performance quietly repricing real estate through the lending system, is the entire reason a company that looks like an engineering consultancy just raised €10 million from venture investors. This is the story of how Fuchs & Eule made a services business fundable, and the playbook any founder can lift from it.

Fuchs & Eule, founded in 2021 and formerly named Valyria, is, in Behlau’s own description, “one of the largest energy advisories for portfolio holders.” Their customers are the people who own or manage buildings at scale: asset managers, family offices, housing associations, insurers, retail chains, funds. The job is to work out how to renovate those buildings for energy performance “as efficiently as possible. Not blindly investing money, but extracting the biggest value increases for the buildings.”

The product ladder is concrete. It starts with an AI-assisted portfolio screening that flags which buildings carry the most risk and the most upside. Then comes the piece customers love most, the energetic due diligence: a deep, building-physics-level analysis, delivered as a digital twin, that says exactly which measures to take, in which order, in which combination, at what cost, and where the economic break-even sits. After that, Fuchs & Eule manages the subsidy capture, the Fördermittel, which in Germany is its own dark art of federal and municipal programs. A vetted partner network handles execution.

The headline numbers, all company-stated: more than 10,000 buildings and over five million square metres analysed since 2021, an average of 21.6 tonnes of CO2 saved per building per year, more than 100 salaried energy experts, a claimed 8% average return on the recommended measures and up to 25% asset-value uplift. Named clients with public testimonials include Primus Valor, Patrizia AG and DEWAG, and the logo wall runs from Deutsche Bank and Union Investment to Vattenfall, Bosch and REWE.

None of that, on its face, screams “venture-backed startup.” It screams “very good consultancy.” Which is exactly the problem Fuchs & Eule had to solve with investors, and the first lesson worth stealing.

The classic VC objection to a services business is that it does not compound. You sell hours, you hire more people, margins stay stubborn, and there is no software moat. Co-CEO Dr. Tobias Frese answers this head-on, and his answer is the spine of the whole raise.

“What’s interesting about the model,” he says, “is that through our many customers we accumulate a huge data treasure. Per building we have several hundred data points.” Ten thousand buildings, each described by hundreds of structured data points, is not a consultancy by-product. It is a proprietary dataset about how German buildings are built, what they cost to fix, and what actually moves an efficiency class, in a market where those costs are notoriously hard to estimate. Every engagement makes the next estimate sharper and the next analysis faster.

The reframe, then, is not “we do energy advisory.” It is “we run a data-generating machine whose current output happens to be energy advisory, and whose accuracy and speed improve with every building.” Behlau pushes the vision further: the data itself becomes the long-term asset, one that “the federal government itself” or insurers might eventually want, for construction-cost indices, building-stock mapping, risk pricing. Whether or not that future arrives, the framing does its job today. It turns a linear service into something that looks like it compounds.

For any founder sitting on a services business that VCs keep passing on, the move is the same: find the asset your service is quietly accreting, data, a network, a distribution channel, a workflow position, and make that the thing you are raising on.

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Fuchs & Eule did not have to manufacture urgency. The European Union did it for them. Under the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, the worst-performing 16% of non-residential buildings across the EU must be upgraded by 2030, and the worst 26% by 2033. That is a hard, dated, legally binding wall, and it sits on top of a rising CO2 price and the lending-value pressure Behlau describes.

This is a fundraising gift most founders never get, and the ones who have it often waste it. A “why now” that rests on a specific regulation with a specific date is far more investable than a “why now” that rests on a vibe about AI or a TAM slide. Frese notes the AI tailwind too, “it’s become more interesting especially in the last nine to fifteen months because of all the AI developments, and that helped us in the whole investor discussion,” but the AI story rides on top of the regulatory story, not instead of it.

If your market has a mandate with a date, that date is your best slide. If it does not, find the nearest thing: a compliance cliff, a subsidy that expires, a standard that becomes mandatory. Investors underwrite deadlines more comfortably than they underwrite dreams.

Look closely at the cap table. The €10M round was led by a new investor, GET Fund, whose partner Dr. Isabelle Canu gave a specific, non-generic reason for backing the company: Fuchs & Eule “stands out by translating building-physics insight into tailored renovation measures that make sense both energetically and economically.” New money, PI Impact and WaVe-X, came in alongside.

But the quiet engine of the round is that all three existing investors, SET Ventures, Picus Capital and Realyze Ventures, re-upped. SET Ventures led the company’s 2024 Series A (back when it was Valyria). Their decision to follow on is the cleanest signal a new lead can read: the people with the most information and the longest exposure chose to put in more. A stacked re-up de-risks the new lead’s diligence before it starts.

The transferable move is to lock and make visible your existing investors’ follow-on before you go out to new leads, then lead your narrative with it. An insider re-up is the most efficient trust you can buy, and it costs you nothing but the conversation.

Behlau is not a first-timer. He co-founded and helped build Aroundhome, one of Germany’s larger home-services businesses, and exited it. He is a “40 under 40.” When he pivoted into building decarbonization, he brought a track record that let investors underwrite the person before the category. Two of his co-founders, Dr. Tobias Frese and Dr. Friso Zimmermann, carry doctorates and the building-physics credibility the product depends on.

The lesson is not “have already sold a company,” because most founders have not. It is that whatever hard-won, specific credibility you do have, prior operating scars, deep domain time, a visible track record, is what compresses a raise. Investors were not underwriting a slideware vision of decarbonization. They were underwriting an operator who had already built and sold once, now attacking a market with a legal deadline and a data moat.

Here is the counterintuitive one. The most obvious way for Fuchs & Eule to make more money would be to monetise the execution: take a lead fee or a kickback from the tradespeople it could easily refer. Behlau refuses, and he is explicit about why. “If you think about a lead fee or a kickback from the tradespeople, you’re no longer neutral and independent for the owner. So we see ourselves the other way round.”

When your entire value proposition is that a property owner can trust your recommendation on a five, twenty, or fifty-million-euro investment decision, neutrality is not a nicety, it is the moat. The moment your advice is contaminated by who pays you on the back end, the advice is worth less. Choosing the smaller, cleaner revenue model on purpose is what keeps the core product, the due diligence customers rave about, credible enough to drive the land-and-expand. “Once customers are with us,” Behlau says, “they’re usually so impressed that they give us more and more of their portfolio.”

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A responsible version of this story has to hold the tension, not just the triumph. German PropTech is in a hard consolidation. Per industry tracker REFIRE, sector growth decelerated to around 4% in the first half of 2025, down from 41% the year before, new company formations fell roughly 30%, and venture funding contracted 18% to about €471 million. More pointedly, REFIRE reports that energy-efficiency PropTechs “typically collapse within 2.3 years.”

Fuchs & Eule is walking into a category with real, well-funded competition. Munich’s Predium raised a €13M Series A led by Norrsken VC (the fund of a Klarna co-founder) to build an ESG-management platform for exactly these owners. Paris-based Deepki raised €150M and has been acquiring, its purchase of energy-management firm Sobre Energie is a clear sign that the larger ESG-data platforms are buying capability and consolidating. Measurable, the US incumbent, covers 18 billion square feet across 93 countries.

The bull case and the bear case share a single fact and split on its interpretation. Fuchs & Eule is a services-plus-data business, not a pure-software platform. The bull case says the services base, more than 100 salaried experts, high retention, deep Fördermittel expertise, execution coordination, is precisely what makes it durable and hard to copy, and the data is what makes it compound. The bear case says services margins invite exactly the “collapse within 2.3 years” fragility the sector is known for, and that a pure-software ESG platform could out-scale it. This piece will not resolve that for you. But any founder studying this raise should sit with the question it poses: is “services plus data” a more defensible moat than software, or a more fragile one? Fuchs & Eule is a €10M bet that, in this market, it is the former.

Reframe your service as the asset it is quietly accreting. Time your raise to a deadline you can prove. Lock and lead with the insider re-up. Raise on your specific credibility, not your deck. And protect the trust that makes you valuable, even when protecting it costs you revenue.

The full playbook below breaks down all six plays behind the €10M round, the exact cap-table mechanics, the honest risk read, and a one-page checklist you can run against your own raise.