Bricks.sh secures €1.6 million to expand AI-native internal tool building
Italian startup Bricks.sh, which is developing an AI-native platform for building internal tools, has raised €1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round. The company said the financing will be used to continue building its product and accelerate development of features designed to help teams create workflow tools more quickly.
Internal tools—dashboards, admin panels, approval flows, reporting interfaces, and lightweight apps used by operations, finance, support, and sales—are a persistent bottleneck for many organizations. They are often built ad hoc, maintained by small engineering teams, or stitched together from spreadsheets and third-party services. Bricks.sh is positioning its product as an AI-first alternative that reduces the time and technical overhead required to create and iterate on these systems.
What Bricks.sh is building
Bricks.sh describes itself as an “AI-native internal tool builder,” a category that sits between traditional custom software development and no-code/low-code platforms. The pitch is straightforward: enable companies to assemble internal applications faster, with AI assisting in the creation of interfaces, workflows, and integrations.
While the company has not disclosed detailed product metrics in its announcement, the focus on internal tooling reflects a broader market trend. Teams increasingly need custom software to connect data sources, automate repetitive processes, and enforce governance—yet many organizations cannot justify dedicating full-time engineering resources to every internal request. Tools that can shorten build cycles and lower maintenance costs have become a key priority, particularly for fast-growing businesses.
How the funding will be used
The €1.6 million pre-seed round will be directed toward continued product development, according to the company. In practical terms, early-stage funding for a platform business like Bricks.sh typically supports:
- Core platform engineering, including reliability, performance, and security improvements;
- AI capabilities that assist with building, testing, and maintaining internal apps;
- Integrations with common enterprise systems and data sources;
- Early go-to-market efforts such as onboarding, documentation, and customer support.
Pre-seed rounds are generally designed to help startups move from early product concept to a more mature minimum viable product and initial market validation. For internal tool builders, that validation often comes from repeatable adoption within teams that need to ship operational workflows quickly and safely.
Why internal tools are a growing battleground
The internal tooling space has evolved from a niche developer concern into a strategic layer for modern companies. As organizations adopt more SaaS products and generate more operational data, the need to unify information and create tailored processes increases. Yet internal tools are rarely a revenue driver on their own, which can make them difficult to prioritize.
This tension has created demand for platforms that simplify internal development without sacrificing control. Traditional no-code tools can be limited by governance requirements, while custom development can be expensive and slow. AI-native approaches aim to bridge that gap by using models to accelerate the creation of interfaces, data transformations, and logic, while still allowing teams to refine and manage the resulting applications.
Key challenges for AI-native builders
Despite the promise, AI-assisted internal tooling comes with hurdles that startups must address to win enterprise trust:
- Security and permissions: internal tools often touch sensitive data and require strict access controls.
- Auditability: companies need to understand how workflows operate and be able to trace changes over time.
- Reliability: operational tools must work consistently, even as underlying data sources change.
- Integration depth: value increases when platforms connect cleanly to databases, CRMs, ticketing systems, and identity providers.
For Bricks.sh, the ability to demonstrate robust governance and dependable integrations will likely be as important as the speed benefits promised by AI.
European momentum in developer and productivity tooling
The raise also highlights ongoing activity in Europe’s early-stage startup ecosystem, where developer tooling and productivity platforms have attracted increasing attention. Italy has historically produced fewer venture-backed software startups than some neighboring markets, but recent years have seen a growing number of teams building global-first products from the country.
In that context, Bricks.sh is entering a competitive arena where differentiation often comes down to usability, enterprise readiness, and the ability to prove measurable time savings. If the platform can help companies reduce reliance on scarce engineering resources while maintaining compliance and control, it could find a receptive audience among mid-sized businesses and fast-scaling startups.
What comes next
Bricks.sh did not disclose investors participating in the pre-seed round or provide a timeline for future fundraising. The next milestones will likely include expanding product capabilities, refining the AI-assisted building experience, and growing early customer adoption.
For internal tool builders, traction is often demonstrated through repeat usage within organizations, expansion from one team to multiple departments, and evidence that tools built on the platform can be maintained with low overhead. As AI becomes more embedded in software creation, startups like Bricks.sh will be judged not just on how quickly they can generate an app, but on how well that app performs in real operational environments.
The €1.6 million pre-seed round gives Bricks.sh additional runway to push toward that goal and compete in a fast-moving category where speed, governance, and integration quality are becoming the defining criteria.
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