Building internal tools has quietly become a major drain on engineering teams. In fact, developers spend weeks, sometimes months, creating admin panels for refunds, subscriptions, user management, and internal workflows.
These tools do not generate revenue, yet they consume a large share of development time. Existing solutions often force a trade-off: move fast but accept rigid tools, or build custom systems and lose speed.
Milan-based startup Bricks.sh aims to eliminate that trade-off. The company has raised €1.6 million in a pre-seed round to help teams build and maintain internal tools automatically, using AI.
The round was led by Primo Capital, with participation from Octopus First Cheque Fund, Eden Ventures, Vesper Holding, and Vento, as well as a group of angel investors. Alongside the funding, Bricks.sh has launched its public beta.
The Italian startup plans to use the new funding to grow its team and expand its global customer base. The focus remains on improving the core product and on making internal tool development faster, simpler, and less painful for development teams worldwide.
Built from firsthand frustration
The idea behind Bricks.sh came directly from the founders’ experience using internal tools.
“The motivation comes from firsthand experience, together with a deep market validation. I spent 2+ years at my previous company building internal tools in Retool, our main competitor. What became clear is that while the real value lives in the backend—what operations are possible, who can perform them, and the business logic—most of the work ends up on the frontend: internal-only UIs that few care about and that need constant maintenance,” says Dario Di Carlo, co-founder and CEO, in an exclusive interview with TFN.
Meanwhile, co-founder Giuliano Torregrossa worked as a freelance consultant for dozens of companies and kept rebuilding the same internal tools repeatedly.
“We started bricks.sh based on these shared insights after 6+ years building internal tooling, then validated them through market conversations: roughly 90% of companies report the same pain and want to drive the time spent on internal tooling as close to zero as possible,” adds Di Carlo.
Three clicks instead of months of work
The Italian company Bricks.sh allows developers to generate a full admin panel by simply connecting their API and database to the platform.
In three clicks, teams get a working internal tool that can be used by both technical and non-technical staff.
The platform also handles maintenance. When an API or database changes, such as adding a new field or updating a table, Bricks.sh automatically updates the admin panel to reflect the change. This eliminates the ongoing maintenance that typically consumes developer time.
How it differs from existing tools
Bricks.sh operates in the same space as established internal tool builders, but takes a different approach.
“Retool is our main competitor, alongside Superblocks, Forest Admin, and Budibase—platforms that let teams assemble prebuilt components to create internal tools,” says Di Carlo.
“We work in the same problem space, but the model is radically different; that’s why we defined bricks.sh as a next-generation internal tool builder. Our tool leverages AI to understand a company’s data and backend infrastructure, then generates internal tools tailored to their use cases,” continues Di Carlo.
“This shifts the effort from manual wiring and configuration to automated understanding and generation. Business teams can still adapt and refine results using natural language without touching any code. Teams focus on the final 5%, the specific adaptations they need, rather than spending time building the first 95% of the tool from scratch,” he adds.
What about diversity?
When we asked about diversity, Di Carlo notes, “We’re actively improving team diversity as we scale. We’ve set clear targets to raise the founding team’s diversity index and will apply the same goals to all future hiring batches.”
Early global traction
Since launch, Bricks.sh has signed up more than 500 users, 99.7% of whom are based outside Italy. Approximately 35% of users are in the US, indicating early global demand.
The company says it was built for international growth, with no need for market-by-market transitions.
The startup experienced a growth spike after integrating with Supabase. A one-click admin panel for Supabase users led to sign-ups tripling within a month.
Niccolò Sanarico, General Partner, Primo Capital, says, “Having spent years as a software engineer and then CTO, I’ve experienced firsthand the frustration of building internal tools. What immediately drew us to Bricks.sh was the elegance of their idea and their smart use of generative AI. But what truly convinced us to lead this round was the team itself. Dario and Giuliano embody the rare combination of technical skill, youthful energy, dedication, and the hunger to fundamentally reshape how developers work, with a global vision from day one.”
