Pantheon AI Secures $25M in Funding

Pantheon AI, an artificial intelligence-enabled architecture startup aimed at developers, owners and tenants, exited stealth mode Tuesday when it announced it had secured $25 million in funding, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Investment companies Felicis and 8VC also participated in the raise for the San Francisco-based proptech company, whose team includes co-founders who worked on AI at Stanford AI Lab, Facebook, Caltech and IBM Watson, as well as architects previously at architecture firms Gensler, SOM and KPF, said David Mace, CEO and founder at Pantheon AI.

“We use proprietary technology that we’ve built that enables us to iterate on the architecture process, all the way through to construction documents, extraordinarily quickly,” Mace said. “In the long term, we’re hoping to basically get those iteration cycles down to real time, such that an architect and a property developer can sit down live and make major changes to the architecture for a space.”

Founded in 2023, Pantheon AI started by focusing on office buildings, and is now expanding to multifamily, hospitality and other building types, said Mace. Pantheon AI delivers services similar to that of an architecture firm, but faster for each iteration cycle, he said, adding that over time the firm will evolve into a software as a service provider.

The company works with existing and planned buildings, Mace said. “We actually are starting with doing mostly one to three floors for existing buildings, and we are just starting to move into doing new buildings, especially in multifamily,” he said. “Long term, we’re excited to tackle several different areas, but right now all the projects that we’re doing are essentially existing buildings.”

Pantheon AI has 11 full-time employees, a count that’s now likely to grow.

“With this funding we are laser-focused on expanding commercialization, meaning working with more and more property developers, owners and tenants,” Mace said. “We will be expanding into multiple different [U.S.] geographies as we do that.”

Pantheon AI’s team includes people with technology and architecture experience, said Mace, who worked in AI at Caltech, Facebook and IBM Watson.

“I started the company with Tiger Sun and Georgios Kontominas,” Mace said. “Tiger’s background is in software and Georgios is an architect. We were all excited that there is a lot of repetitive work that goes into the architecture process, and we thought that it would benefit architects and their customers to have far faster iteration cycles enabled by AI, so that architects could focus on the higher-level creative work. That was where we came up with the idea of really wanting to push toward extremely fast iteration cycles and long-term, real-time iteration cycles on the whole design and blueprint process.”

Faster iteration can save money on a project, Mace said. Pantheon AI ties into approximated material costs for commoditized and vendor-specific materials, allowing the firm to do cost estimates throughout the iteration process. The transparency helps clients and also reduces unexpected events. The company claims that such instant visibility enables it to optimize designs to help meet cost goals.

“The technology we built out is extraordinarily hard technology to build,” said Mace. “It took us essentially a year to get it to this point. I think we wouldn’t have been able to do that without our background. So we’re excited to marry the hard technology piece to being able to serve this industry.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.