Proptech Startup Latii Raises $5M in Seed Round

Founded in January 2023 and headquartered in Brooklyn, Latii will use the new funding to continue to develop and launch its artificial intelligence-powered tools to streamline the supply chain process for customers and fabricators, said Santiago “Santi” Bueno, Latii’s CEO and co-founder along with Juan Pascual Orero, its COO. The funding will also be used for Latii’s expansion in the U.S., particularly in the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains and the New York tri-state.

Latii describes itself as a managed marketplace and supply chain automation tool for construction materials for windows and doors, drawing on products from Latin America, Southern Europe and North Africa. 

“I noticed that there was a lot of idle industrial capacity within Latin America that could be purposed for the American market, and that was the inception of the company,” said Bueno, a Colombia native and South America construction industry veteran. “We decided to specialize in windows and doors because we see a large opportunity from several angles. One, it is a segment that is becoming more sophisticated very quickly in America as new energy regulations affect different parts of the country.

“Secondly, the architectural [demand for] windows and doors has changed significantly. We’re going after more minimalist, more European designs that aren’t super readily available in the market. What we discovered was that we could buy high-end inputs out of Europe, bring them to Latin America, and manufacture them in a very cost-efficient manner, get them certified to American standards and bring them to market here, creating up to 60 percent savings for our customers.”

In addition to raw materials sourcing and fabrication in Mexico, Latii has expanded those efforts to Morocco and Portugal, said Bueno.

Latii is already working with customers in Texas, and said it has facilitated more than $1 million in orders in the past 12 months. The company is now building an automated, AI-powered quoting engine to quickly grow its footprint across the U.S. 

“We’ve uncovered several pain points in the supply chain of windows and doors that we believe can be automated,” Bueno explained. “And, now, with the availability of large language models, it becomes even more automated. On the demand side, we’ve encountered that the quoting system for windows and doors is extremely expensive from a labor standpoint and very prone to errors. We’re basically automating the start and subsequent quoting of the units so that the user or the buyer is only spending their time in reviewing and ensuring that everything is complete with a very simple user interface. Before, they were spending a lot of time doing data entry that could lead to a lot of errors.”

Latii is developing AI tools to check the quality of custom window and door designs at the factory, where the quoting system in particular can be complex and time-consuming, he said. The company’s AI uses machine vision to read blueprints and generate images that are then translated into text. The AI then runs them through a large language model, producing a quote that has the specification and the requirements for that project.

“A very complex quote can take up to a week if not two,” said Bueno. “With our software, we’ve reduced quoting times to basically half a minute. You upload all the information about the product into our platform, and within 30 seconds you receive a quote that you can then review and submit for pricing.”

Streamlining quotes is what drew in Leadout Capital as the seed round’s main investor. 

“When we spoke with customers, one of their major frustrations concerned the traditional quoting process, which often took over a week and was error-prone,” said Steve Brownlie, general partner at Leadout Capital. “Latii is disrupting the $65 billion window and door market by dramatically streamlining the quoting process while also delivering higher-quality custom products at a significant discount.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.