Archiboost AI Raises Combined $6.2M Pre-Seed and Seed Round
Archiboost AI, a platform helping architecture, engineering and construction teams identify errors, omissions and coordination issues in construction documents, announced Tuesday a combined $6.2 million pre-seed and seed funding.
Hanabi Capital and Marathon Venture Capital led the round with RXR Arden Digital Ventures (RADV), Perceptive Ventures and Valley Capital Partners also participating. Angel investors Scott Belsky, former chief product officer at Adobe; Aatish Nayak, former vice president of product at Harvey AI; and Augusto Marietti, CEO at Kong AI also contributed to the funding.
Designed to catch construction document errors before they reach the field, Archiboost AI said its artificial intelligence has reviewed more than 550,000 drawing sheets across $3.5 billion in projects, with customers such as WRNS Studio, OTJ Architects and RXR.
“We did our pre-seed last May, and we just did our seed round a month ago, but never made an announcement for the pre-seed,” said Georgios Kontominas, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Archiboost AI. “We were in stealth until March of this year and came out of stealth at the AIA San Francisco AI conference. That’s where we showed our product to architects first and signed our first client.”
Kontominas said Archiboost AI differs from other proptech companies in the AEC field for several reasons.
“The majority of the competition out there is not related to the industry,” said Kontominas. “They don’t understand the workflows. They don’t understand how an architect or an engineer or a general contractor operates. We have knowledge coming from the industry. I worked at architecture firms. Most of our competition is only using computer vision to read PDF drawings. We’re using PDF and Revit files at the same time, combining my expertise in importing Revit metadata with computer vision to give us accuracy that no competitor has hit so far.
“And that’s why we don’t have a human in the loop. Some of our competitors have a human to review the results in the end before they give them to the client. We don’t need that. We’re hitting higher accuracies without a human in the loop.”
With 10 full-time employees, Archiboost plans to use the latest funding to expand its quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) review engine, along with deploying its construction administration agent that can access client drawings, specifications and draw information from outside sources such as Autodesk Construction Cloud and Procore, said Kontominas. The firm has also recently expanded to Canada.
“We believe AEC is one of the largest untapped markets for AI,” Bryan Offutt, a partner at Hanabi Capital, said in the funding announcement. “But Georgios and Vasu [co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Vasu Jogani] are why we invested. Their vision for Archiboost gives us confidence that they can reshape how this industry works.”
Archiboost already boasts a number of AEC and real estate developer clients.
WRNS Studio, twice ranked the No. 1 overall architecture firm in the U.S. by Architect magazine’s Architect 50, has deployed Archiboost across its offices in San Francisco, New York, Honolulu and Seattle, while New York developer RXR is also a client and investor, investing through its venture capital firm RXR Arden Digital Ventures (RADV).
“We’re excited to invest in Archiboost, and just as excited to use it,” Matt Boras, managing director and head of RADV, said in a statement. “As an owner, we have to evaluate every drawing set our design teams deliver. Archiboost gives us a second pair of eyes in our QA/QC reviews.”
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
Source: commercialobserver.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.