KEWAZO raises funding to accelerate LIFTBOT deployment in heavy industry
The Crane Operator and the Robot: KEWAZO's Bet on Heavy Industry Artem Kuchukov spent years watching the same problem play out on construction sites and industrial plants across Russia and the United States: workers hoisting materials by hand, cranes backed up, schedules slipping, bodies at risk.
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Artem Kuchukov spent years watching the same problem play out on construction sites and industrial plants across Russia and the United States: workers hoisting materials by hand, cranes backed up, schedules slipping, bodies at risk. He was a civil engineer by training, and the inefficiency wasn't theoretical to him — it was the job site.
In 2016, he co-founded KEWAZO in Munich to do something about it. Eight years and $35 million in total funding later, his LIFTBOT robot is working at more than 20 industrial sites across North America and Europe — refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical complexes, power facilities — doing the work of replacing cranes and manual handling during maintenance and capital projects.
"We help industrial asset owners adopt automation by delivering instant value in vertical material movement," Kuchukov said in the company's announcement of its latest funding round. "Our clients hear about robotics, but they rarely see robots operating at their plants."
The new round — led by Schooner Capital with participation from Chevron Technology Ventures, Asahi Kasei, Benson Capital, Mana Ventures, Gaingels, and Atlas Ventures — brings KEWAZO's total funding to $35 million. Existing investors True Ventures and Cybernetix Ventures also participated.
The Chevron investment is notable. Energy majors have been cautious about robotics deployments at active facilities, where a malfunction near flammable materials carries real consequences. That Chevron's venture arm is putting money behind KEWAZO suggests at minimum a watching brief — and at best, a quiet signal that the technology has cleared some internal threshold of trust.
What LIFTBOT actually does today is straightforward: it automates vertical material movement — scaffolding, material hoisting, the physical labor that keeps a refinery turnaround on schedule. KEWAZO says the robot improves safety, enhances efficiency, and brings predictability to maintenance windows. The company's marketing materials claim LIFTBOT can save up to 44% of labor costs in scaffolding operations, though that figure comes from KEWAZO itself and hasn't been independently verified.
The more interesting — and more speculative — part of the pitch is what KEWAZO calls its "Physical AI platform." The company describes LIFTBOT deployments as granting it access to high-barrier industrial environments, where it collects structured operational data. That data, in theory, becomes the foundation for something bigger: AI that enables fuller automation of industrial workflows. "Designed to introduce transparency today and enable automation tomorrow," in the company's words.
That's a familiar startup narrative: the hardware is the beachhead, the data is the moat, the AI is the future. Whether KEWAZO actually gets there depends on whether the deployment numbers hold, whether the data is as structured as the company claims, and whether the industrial incumbents decide they want KEWAZO as a partner or a target.
What's largely absent from KEWAZO's announcement is the workforce angle. The company's investors talk about "enabling the workforce to focus on higher-value efforts" — the standard formulation — but there's no discussion of what happens to the crane operators, the scaffold builders, the manual laborers who currently do this work. Industrial automation doesn't eliminate jobs so much as it shifts what humans do and who controls the terms. At a refinery, that question has union and safety implications that go well beyond a press release.
Kuchukov himself has a master's degree in Advanced Construction and Building Technology from the Technical University of Munich and ten years of experience in construction robotics, according to his professional profile. He's not a software entrepreneur cosplaying as an industrial expert — he comes to this from the ground up.
The Gulf Coast is a particular focus for the new investors. Benson Capital, based in the region, frames KEWAZO's deployment as equipping "this region's workforce" with tools to keep America's "industrial backbone safe, efficient, and globally competitive." It's a political argument as much as a financial one — the kind that plays well in Texas and Louisiana, where refinery work is both economically vital and culturally freighted.
Whether KEWAZO can deliver on any of this at scale is the open question. The company has 20 sites and a product that works — those are meaningful data points. But 20 sites is not a proof of scale, and "deployed at refineries" is not the same as "replacing a critical workflow at an active facility without incident."
For now, the robots are on site. The question is whether the humans who run those sites will keep them.
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