Germany heats its homes and then watches the energy disappear through the walls.
Across millions of inadequately insulated German residential buildings, heating systems run continuously to compensate for what escapes through uninsulated cavities, ceilings, and floors. Without proper insulation, thermal energy leaves the building regardless of how it was generated. The technology to fix this has existed for decades. The economics are compelling: payback periods well under ten years, no heavy capital investment, immediate savings on energy bills. And yet fewer than one in a hundred German buildings is renovated each year.
Insulation is the most cost-effective, lowest-disruption first step in decarbonizing a home. The opportunity has been clear. What has been missing is the infrastructure to deliver it at scale. That is the gap VARM is closing.
A market at an inflection point
Germany’s buildings are responsible for nearly a third of the country’s CO₂e emissions, and the direction of travel is unambiguous. Regulation is tightening at both the national and European level (think of the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive), carbon pricing on building fuels under ETS2 is on the way, and public subsidies already make the economics attractive for homeowners today. Even without them, the numbers work. The pressure on building owners to act is only going to grow.
Demand, in other words, is no longer the bottleneck. Delivery capacity is.
Germany’s renovation rate sits below one percent of building stock per year, far short of what the transition requires. The insulation market today is served by skilled local and regional craft businesses that do excellent work within their radius. Scaling nationally calls for digital coordination, quality assurance across thousands of simultaneous projects, and workforce infrastructure that only a purpose-built platform can provide. The opportunity is to build that layer and let the existing workforce grow with it.
AI-orchestrated building insulation at scale
VARM was founded in Berlin in 2023 by Christian Grüner and Sebastian Würz. Before building any platform, they ran early insulation projects themselves, learning the craft from the inside before designing the system around it.
The result is an AI-orchestrated delivery platform for building insulation that manages the entire process end to end. JARVIS, VARM’s proprietary AI platform, coordinates everything from the first homeowner inquiry through subsidy advisory, crew scheduling, on-site quality assurance, and post-installation documentation. Every project runs on the same standardized process. Every completed installation feeds data back into better planning. Quality is verifiable, consistent, and scalable across the network.
Alongside its own installation crews, VARM operates a Cloud Installer network of regional operators who run their businesses through the VARM platform, under the VARM brand. Local expertise and relationships stay intact; the platform provides everything that would otherwise limit growth. Within two years of founding, this model reached coverage across 13 of Germany’s 16 federal states.
How VARM fits GET Fund
GET Fund backs companies that deliver real-world decarbonization through industrial scalability. VARM sits precisely at that intersection.
Delivering insulation at national scale is fundamentally an operations and technology problem, and VARM treats it as both at once. A platform without physical operations cannot guarantee the execution quality that matters in a market where insulation is invisible once installed. An installation business without a digital backbone cannot absorb the volume that the energy transition demands. VARM has built both as one system, controlling the full value chain from first customer contact to verified completion.
The Cloud Installer model also turns the installer role into an entrepreneurship pathway, opening up business ownership to a new generation of operators in one of Europe’s most needed trades.
One million homes
VARM’s goal is to insulate one million homes over the next decade. That is what AI-orchestrated building insulation at scale actually means: not a slogan, but the operating system for a renovation wave Germany has talked about for years and is only now beginning to deliver.
We are proud to back Christian, Sebastian, and the entire VARM team in building it.
Learn more about VARM: varm.earth
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