Ironic timing but we’re thrilled to share that VARM, the German startup making home insulation scalable, has raised €17.5M in a Series A led by the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and co-led by GET Fund, with participation from Aurum Impact and existing investors Pale Blue Dot, noa and us. VARM has been part of the Emerge community since we co-led its €5.7M seed in 2024 — and we’re so proud to be backing Christian and Sebastian again.
Europe’s energy transition still has a labour problem. Around 14 million German homes remain poorly insulated, and insulating them is one of the cheapest, fastest and most proven ways to cut both emissions and bills. The bottleneck has never been the technology or the demand; it’s the shortage of skilled people to do the work. That’s the gap VARM was built to close, and this growth round is what closing it at scale now looks like.
VARM’s answer is its Cloud Installer model. It trains career-changers – people from logistics, retail and other sectors with no formal trade qualification – into certified insulation specialists in a matter of weeks, then deploys them in regional teams backed by fixed-price quoting and VARM’s own quality control. A standard single-family home takes around six hours. Since our Seed raise, VARM has gone from one German city to seven and passed more than 1,000 completed installations, now covering façades, roofs, ceilings and cellars, and handling the whole job from planning and grant applications through to a fixed-price offer homeowners can see before any work begins.
Christian Grüner and Sebastian Würz are founders we described at seed as execution machines, and the 18 months since have only made our instinct about this stronger. Christian is a mathematician and former Siemens Advanta operator; Sebastian previously co-founded homefully, later acquired by Habyt. They’ve stayed honest about who usually gets left out of the energy transition, on both sides of the job: financing so the households that most need insulation can afford it, and a business-in-a-box so installers can own the companies they build.
“The day this clicked for me, the installer walking me round the job had been working in retail eighteen months earlier – and now ran his own VARM crew. That’s two problems solved with one hire: a cold home made warm, and a real sustainable livelihood created. Now multiply him by every career-changer in every city where buildings still bleed heat. That’s a workforce Europe doesn’t currently have, solving the most pressing challenge of our generation. We’re delighted to go again with Christian and Sebastian.”
Mario, Emerge
The funding will expand VARM’s regional installer network and the training and deployment infrastructure behind it, as the company pushes from seven German cities towards a European footprint of hyper-local hubs.
Christian, Sebastian and the whole VARM team – congratulations. One million homes, ten years; seven cities down. Let’s (not) turn up the heat!
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