Proptech AI Has Designs on Architecture

As artificial intelligence continues to address virtually every aspect of life, proptech entrepreneurs are finding opportunities to design digital advances in the analog-first world of architecture.

In particular, proptech firms are consistently drafting new ways to make architecture firms more efficient and profitable using AI.

One approach involves using AI to help architects reduce permit approval time from several weeks to a few days, potentially cutting down on construction costs and errors, said Maor Greenberg, co-founder and CEO at Spacial AI, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup whose goal is to replace structural as well as mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) engineers in the architectural design process.

“Spacial is coming to replace these people in the entire design process, meaning architects can focus on the creative part — which is the floor plan, elevations, working with you as a homeowner on the programming of what you want in the house — and then giving it to Spacial,” said Greenberg.

At that stage, Spacial matches the structural MEP plans and architectural digital drawings, bringing them into alignment with each other. The company’s AI converts PDF files to a 3D model, too. “It is an object-based model that also gives us the power to do code validation and design conflict detection,” said Greenberg.

There’s a big reason why Greenberg says more architecture firms are adopting AI.

“Architects do not enjoy being architects anymore,” he said. “They used to be focused on being creative and designing amazing homes. Now, they basically need to act like a lawyer. There are so many regulations, mostly in the blue states, that the amount of paperwork needed to build a house went up from 20 to 30 pages to 100 to 120 pages per house. And that’s not the part that the architect wants to be doing. So, AI technology is coming.”

Rework and reordering accounts for 30 percent of costs on a construction project, Greenberg said. 

“The AI can run building code validation, but at the same time be trained to be a framer, an electrician, a plumber, etc. It can be the trade person on site and look at those plans from a trade perspective. So when you look at it from the architectural, engineering and the trade sides, this is where you are preventing the issues that actually happen after the fact on site.”

Spacial’s goal is to make work easier and more efficient for the architects and anyone else involved in the design process, said Greenberg, whose company is focused for now on residential architecture and construction. 

“Compared to many other startups out there, we think the architects are not replaceable,” he said. “Besides being the creative person on a job, they’re also the project manager. If you’re spending half a million, a million or two million dollars, you need a person you’re going to trust, and that’s the architect or the designer of the project.”

Having started a development and construction company in Israel prior to moving to the U.S. — where he replicated his model and added an architecture firm — Greenberg has nearly 20 years of experience in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. It was the inefficiencies he saw in the process that led him to start Spacial.

“The reason I opened a lot of other companies that related to the same subject was with the goal to be a fully integrated operation,” he said. “And, by being fully integrated, the operation could reduce the rework and the waste. But because we weren’t engineers, we had something missing. I always had the idea of becoming an efficient structural engineer firm, and now with AI enabling us to achieve that technology venture I decided to make the switch.”

Startup Acelab is an AI-driven platform designed to streamline material selection and decision-making for architecture firms. The Brooklyn-based company uses AI for data collection, onboarding and recommendations, said Vardhan Mehta, co-founder and CEO at Acelab.

“Acelab is a platform meant for all staff members at an architecture firm,” said Mehta. “That could be an architect, interior architect, or the technical, technology or spec writing teams, to manage all their decision-making around the materials they use in their projects and their standards, all in one place.”

The company aims to streamline activities such as material selection. Historically, that’s been done through catalogs or manufacturers’ websites, which can end in a flurry of emails and phone calls, according to Mehta.

“All of that is a time suck,” he said, “and usually leads architecture firms to keep repeating the products they’ve used in the past, just because it’s a lot easier to recycle the stuff you’ve used in the past than researching the best options available in the market.”

Acelab has trained its agentic recommendations AI engine on a huge amount of data for all the products and the manufacturers available in the U.S. market, said Mehta. “An architect can go on there and easily ask it to optimize their selection based on criteria like sustainability, performance, cost or durability — any of the factors that’s important to the project.”

Architecture firms and owners can also use Acelab to manage their firms’ data based on previous project decision-making records, he added. The software, too, integrates with other document tools, such as AutoDesk’s BIM software company Revit.

In March, Acelab launched Materials Hub, which provides AI–powered material recommendations for architecture, engineering, construction and operations firms to help cut costs and boost sustainability, performance and other project criteria, he said.

“We saw immediate adoption from some of the largest firms in the industry, including AECOM, Stantec and CannonDesign, among others,” said Mehta. “Currently, more than 19,000 architecture and design firms use Acelab. On the owner side, we’re onboarding Amazon, Bloomberg, Hilton and more. This technology is especially relevant right now to keep projects on budget and on schedule to mitigate risks caused by external factors such as tariffs, supply chain disruptions, cost spikes and lead time delays.”

Investors are as interested as entrepreneurs in proptech AI for architecture.

TLV Partners is a $1.2 billion generalist venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage Israeli software technology companies worldwide. Roughly 10 percent of the company’s investments are in proptech, with an increasing interest in startups focused on AI for architecture and engineering, particularly in the pre-construction phase.

“I think that the pre-construction phase was definitely something that we really wanted to laser in on, mostly because it was so outdated,” said Yonatan Mandelbaum, a partner at TLV Partners. “Looking at the whole realm of architecture, it seemed like that was one of the major bottlenecks in the entire construction process — making sure that the architecture process can be completed efficiently so that the construction can actually get started.”

Mandelbaum sees growing competition among early-stage proptech firms addressing AI for architecture, as well as more venture capital focus on funding such startups.

“In terms of competition, I think they go hand in hand,” Mandelbaum said. “Where there’s talented entrepreneurs building interesting technologies, investors follow. We’re seeing lots of interest in the early growth stages. Of course, it’s not exactly the same type of sales process as selling to a Fortune 1000 enterprise. These are different types of businesses with different considerations of how they purchase software. We need to take that in mind, and so does everyone who’s investing in this space, but it’s attracting a lot of investment dollars for sure.”

Among other proptech firms attacking various AI for architecture and design issues are Joist AI, a San Diego-based company focused on proposal automation for AEC companies; and qbiq, a platform that automates and optimizes architectural services for the real estate market based in Manhattan.

“When we onboard an architectural firm, we take all their data and essentially build this knowledge graph for them,” said Rohan Jawali, founder and CEO at Joist AI. “So, it’s essentially a representation of a brain. It remembers everything so that you can continue to work with more and more clients, proposals and pursuits.”

Founded in 2021 and operating in the U.S. and Europe, the demand for Joist Ai’s software has been “ridiculous,” said Jawali, adding that the company has been expanding from 100 percent to more than 650 to 700 percent year-over-year, with small and large firm clients. 

“We’ve grown about 3,000 percent in the last year and consistently have a 10 percent month-over-month growth,” he said.

Similarly, qbiq has seen demand grow quickly across its U.S. and Europe markets since its founding in 2019, said the company’s co-founder and CEO Leeor Solnik.

“We concluded the first year with more than $2 million in revenue and in the first quarter of our launch we did 5 million square feet of plans, doubling up in the second year square-foot-wise,” said Solnik. “We now serve more than half a million square feet.”

One issue for proptech companies working with architecture firms centers on money.

“The architects get paid by the hour,” said Acelab’s Mehta. “So, for them, time is money, and they’re not always incentivized to go into deep research to find the best outcome or product for each of the two to 300 things they’ll have to choose on a project. In the past, it has been easier for them just to keep repeating stuff.”

However, architects with such a mindset might have much more to worry about: Having a proptech AI company replace their firms entirely.

That is the aim of Cove, said Sandeep Ahuja, CEO and co-founder of the Atlanta-based, AI-powered architecture and design firm.

“We’re a full-service architecture firm,” Ahuja said. “And we’re the world’s first AI-powered architecture firm. There’s literally no one else that does this.”

Having invested $25 million over the last decade in creating its proprietary software, Vitras.ai, Cove exited stealth mode four months ago with total funding of $37 million, said Ahuja. All the funding came from generalist VCs, she added.

Cove’s AI is designed as an end-to-end platform for coordination, quality and speed in architectural projects, avoiding common issues like miscoordination and delays. That scope differentiates it from other proptech AI for architecture companies, Ahuja said. The firm focuses on multifamily, hospitality, retail, data centers and warehouses.

“We’re bringing architecture into 2025 and onwards,” said Ahuja, an architect and technologist who graduated from Georgia Tech and remained in Atlanta to found her company. “What that means is significantly improved coordination and higher quality, along with our ability to maximize performance pro forma internal rates of returns and do it all significantly faster.”

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