The hour before the pour is where a defect becomes demolition

Rôgga has spent nearly two decades building homes in Joinville, southern Brazil, and today ranks among the country’s 20 largest construction companies.

It has delivered flats to more than 16,000 families, and it is now scaling up again with a new industrialised construction model, designed to deliver between 3,500 and 4,500 apartments a year using prefabricated elements.

Prefabricated construction means building panels, slabs and staircases off-site in a factory, then assembling them on-site like a giant kit of parts.

Of course, such a process only works if the digital design and the physical build are fully synchronised.

The main challenge in modern construction is ensuring that the digital design and the physical build are perfectly synchronised.

Rôgga understands it is essential to ensure its BIM (Building Information Modelling) models reliably reflect what is actually executed on-site.

Processes that rely on manual checks or constant internet connections often cannot keep up with the fast pace of construction innovation.

Rôgga’s new industrialised model risked launching with the failure it was designed to avoid: concrete poured over improperly positioned structural elements, discovered too late, forcing demolition and rework while it was supposed to deliver affordable, sustainable housing at scale.

The drawing and the photo, side by side, before anyone signs off

Hustro is a Polish AI-native field operations platform.

It is already running on more than 4,000 construction sites across 8 countries, covering quality, health and safety, environmental and documentation control.

For Rôgga, the platform brings four elements together in one workflow:

  • Offline-first mobile inspection: The app works with no signal on site and syncs automatically once the connection returns, with the interface and checklists in Portuguese so not only engineers but site crews also use it.
  • Pre-pour quality gate: A structured digital checklist for each type of prefabricated element (double walls, pre-slabs, staircases, balcony slabs), built around Rôgga’s own execution standards and NBR (Brazil’s official technical construction standards) technical codes. This means a stage cannot be closed until every reinforcement, pipe and sequencing check is photographed and signed off by a named person.
  • AI support built on Rôgga’s own 2D execution drawings: Hustro’s AI reads the drawings and specifications and automatically generates the inspection points, then places the relevant drawing extract next to the photo taken on site, so one screen shows what was designed alongside what was built. An experimental layer flags likely anomalies, but the final call always stays with a human inspector.
  • Non-conformance workflow: Every finding goes to a named, responsible person with a deadline. Subcontractors can reply by e-mail without needing an account, and every issue keeps a full audit trail with an automatic PDF report.

The goal is to cut the engineering team’s manual on-site checking time by half and catch every assembly error while it can still be corrected in minutes.

This should allow Rôgga to build an audit process to be rolled out across every site.

Three services delivered by EU-LAC & Numbers both companies can defend

Corporate-startup pilots often stall not because the technology fails, but because nobody agreed in advance what “working” actually means, which is why the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator structured this partnership around three services.

  • Service n°1: PoC design & evaluation roadmap

It splits the pilot into verifiable phases: business analysis and setting a measurement baseline, training the AI model on Rôgga’s own 2D execution documentation, and on-site validation on a live building.

It defines exactly how three separate variables get measured: 

– inspection time,
– number of non-conformities caught before the pour,
– rework avoided as a result.

So the outcome is numbers both companies agree on.

 

“
For us at Rôgga, the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator transformed international innovation into a high-impact reality. We deeply understand the value of open innovation and the necessity of developing a joint project with Hustro, combining our solid on-site construction expertise in Brazil with cutting-edge European data intelligence. This cross-border collaboration allows us to leverage global best practices and bring computer vision directly into our active construction sites, right before the point of no return, which is the concrete pour, eliminating material waste and elevating the precision standard of prefabricated construction.
Osvaldo MARTINS DE CARVALHO NETTO, Engineering and Real Estate Development Director, RÔGGA
Osvaldo MARTINS DE CARVALHO NETTO, Engineering and Real Estate Development Director, RÔGGA

 

  • Service n°2: Open Innovation Bootcamp

This is a one-day workshop where both companies apply open-innovation methods to their own pilot and align on the collaboration model itself, not only the technology.

  • Service n°3: International growth & Soft landing

This service will provide Hustro the regulatory and market guidance it needs to operate in Brazil and access to the wider Latin American and Caribbean ecosystem, so a single reference site can turn into a regional presence rather than a one-off deployment.

50% less inspection time, zero rework and a LATAM expansion case

Here is what both companies expect once the pilot on Rôgga’s live building closes:

🏗️ Rôgga
(Corporate)

🔍 Hustro
(Startup)

  • 50% cut in the engineering team’s manual on-site inspection time.
  • Zero concrete or steel waste from assembly errors caught before the pour.
  • A repeatable inspection standard ready to roll out across every Rôgga site, supporting the 3,500 – 4,500 apartments a year model.
  • A validated pre-pour inspection workflow, at least 50% faster than today’s baseline.
  • Zero rework from undetected assembly errors on the pilot’s structures.
  • A reference case to win 3 to 5 more customers in Latin America within 12 months of the pilot closing.

 

“
Rôgga came to the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator with a problem stated precisely: prove that prefabricated elements are correctly assembled in the hours before the concrete pour, when a mistake stops being a defect and becomes a demolition. Rôgga is not simply testing our software: they are opening a live building of their new industrialised model, putting their own engineers and site crews behind the pilot, and sitting with our team to define what a correct pre-pour verification actually looks like. The EU-LAC Digital Accelerator gave the collaboration the structure it needed: an agreed work plan, milestones and a measurable baseline for inspection time, so that both companies will know whether it worked. What excites us most is that we are not localising a European product for a Brazilian client: together with Rôgga, we are defining the quality standard for industrialised construction, proven on their sites first.
Ernest SZYDELSKI, CEO & Co-Founder, HUSTRO
Ernest SZYDELSKI, CEO & Co-Founder, HUSTRO
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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