Bildia
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Bildia was a Madrid-based construction-tech startup founded around 2020 by Jerónimo van Schendel Erice, dedicated to digitising the supply chain of the construction sector. Its cloud software let companies in the industry manage, automate and centralise purchasing, contracting and sales of products and services - essentially a platform for construction estimation and procurement, with real-time global market data. It reached Series A financing and 14 employees (2024) before shutting down in 2025.
02 / Bildia FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No founder post-mortem is public, but the pattern fits the contech squeeze of 2024-2025. Procurement platforms live or die on transaction volume: Bildia had to convince a fragmented, low-digitalisation industry - Spain's construction sector - to centralise purchasing through its platform, which requires enormous sales effort per customer and long adoption cycles. A Series A round and 14 employees give a small team little margin for error: with the European venture market tightening, there was no room for a slow-burn network-effects business. Competing against entrenched players (BuildingConnected in the US, Cosuno in Germany, ProTenders in MENA) on features alone rarely wins; it requires liquidity and scale Bildia never reached. When the runway ended, so did the company.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Bildia's own website states the Madrid construction-supply-chain startup (founders Jerónimo van Schendel, Mencey Melgar, Nicolás van Schendel) contributed between 2020 and 2025 and that 'our work ends now, exactly when that of others begins,' a first-party operational close rather than a reported bankruptcy.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Procurement platforms need liquidity before features: without enough buyers and suppliers transacting, software is just a cost.
- 02
Fragmented, low-tech industries adopt slowly: construction's long sales cycles demand a much longer runway than Series A provides.
- 03
Network-effects businesses cannot be slow-burn: they need capital to survive until liquidity - a tightening venture market kills them first.
- 04
Watch the exits of your competitors: when the category consolidates, being small and undifferentiated is fatal.
- 05
A quiet shutdown is still data: no post-mortem, no announcement - the economics spoke.