Acelab Secures $14M Series A Funding

Architecture and construction materials platform Acelab announced Tuesday that it has secured $13.5 million in Series A funding.

Navitas Capital led the round with participation from investors JLL Spark and DivcoWest. The round also included investments from notable architects Kai-Uwe Bergmann (partner at BIG) and Christopher Sharples (founding principal at SHoP), along with returning investors Pillar VC, Draper Associates, PJC and Transcend Partners. Sharon Prince, founder and CEO at Grace Farms Foundation, also joined as an investor.

The latest round brings Manhattan-based Acelab’s total funding to more than $25 million since its founding in 2021. The Series A funding will expand Acelab’s reach to interiors and engineering as well as geographically to the European Union and the United Kingdom. Acelab plans to hire across departments, including sales, marketing, finance and AI, said Vardhan Mehta, co-founder and CEO.

“Over the past two years, Acelab has emerged as the industry standard for architecture firms, real estate developers and operators to research and select the building materials for their projects,” said Mehta. “There are 20,000-plus design firms and owners across the country who are using the platform, including more than half the top 100 architecture firms around the globe.

“There’s a big appetite in the industry for very intentional AI tools that understand the nuances of our industry, as opposed to generating AI tools, which are hard to trust. They tend to hallucinate a lot more. I really believe we found a solution for the entire team to work together on one single output.”

Mehta ascribed Acelab’s funding prowess to a combination of what he described as the most robust data ecosystem that the industry has ever had access to — including all the products from virtually every manufacturer in the country and the ability to evaluate the product against the market in one place ‚ along with end-to-end workflow tools for every phase of a project.

“I think the industry is really tired of piecemeal solutions,” said Mehta. “We’re always adjusting our AI for agentic recommendations to any user on the platform to give them recommendations. And then also using AI to automate the documentation they might require on the project. With this new raise, we will be expanding in a few different vectors. So far, all the architectural products are already on the platform. Now we’ll expand that horizontally to include interiors, engineering, and other fields where the same pain point exists.”

Over the last five years Acelab has gone from a startup founded by Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology students to the construction industry standard for researching and selecting materials for building projects, the company claims. Among the companies using Acelab are AECOM, CannonDesign, Gensler and Stantec.

“Acelab is emerging as the definitive platform for material selection,” Travis Putnam, managing partner at Navitas Capital, said in a statement. “The company ensures architects, owners and contractors select the best building products in a single collaborative workflow, resulting in better performing buildings and stronger alignment across project teams.”

Another Acelab backer, Ajey Kaushal, investment principal at JLL Spark, said in a statement that Acelab handles the grunt work well so people don’t have to. 

“JLL’s global team of nearly 1,000 in-house architects and designers supports the largest owners on workplace design, multi-site rollouts and retail retrofits,” Kaushal said. “Acelab allows our teams to streamline an otherwise tedious and iterative material selection process and balance an owner’s project-specific goals (aesthetics, cost, timeline) with its enterprise commitments (brand, environmental impact, compliance). Its AI-native workflow enables service alignment and standardization for our global enterprise, supports our professionals in delivering exceptional white-glove service, and leads to an outstanding end product for our clients.”

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