Toronto-based construction technology startup Augmenta has secured an additional $10 million USD ($14.4 million CAD) in seed funding to refine and expand its building design software.
Raised via a simple agreement for future equity, Augmenta’s latest financing closed earlier this month and was led by Prelude Ventures with support from fellow new Silicon Valley-based investor Montage Ventures.
This round brings Augmenta’s total funding to nearly $37 million CAD, a figure that includes a $5.3-million CAD seed round in 2022 and a $15.6-million CAD seed extension from 2023.
Augmenta’s tech is being used to help design systems for hospitals, schools, labs, and maintenance facilities.
Augmenta was founded in 2018 by former Autodesk employees who built the San Francisco-based construction tech giant’s generative design tool. The Toronto startup is developing a platform designed to help contractors and engineers produce detailed, compliant building plans much faster and more cheaply with artificial intelligence (AI).
The company is approaching this problem “from the inside out,” co-founder and CEO Francesco Iorio told BetaKit in an exclusive interview. To date, Augmenta’s efforts have focused largely on figuring out how to automate electrical system design.
Augmenta claims that its AI platform helps eliminate the risk of errors, reduces rework, and optimizes designs for sustainability and cost-effectiveness, helping contractors, engineers, and real estate developers save time and money. The company claims its software can generate electrical designs “in hours instead of weeks” using advanced machine learning and rule-based computational methods, with humans involved to ensure quality control, code compliance, and make final decisions.
“Construction is one of the largest industries in the world and has been slow to adopt new technology,” Prelude managing director Matt Eggers told BetaKit. “We believe Augmenta’s generative AI solution can fit directly into the current building design workflow [and] toolset and reduce time, cost, and waste.”
Eggers said that Prelude was excited by the productivity gains that Augmenta’s customers have already been realizing.
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The first building built using Augmenta’s tech was a public school in Lansing, Mich., Iorio said. The company recently began making its software available to a broader set of customers and partners. Today, the CEO said the startup’s tech is being used to help design systems for a range of buildings, including hospitals, universities, labs, and maintenance facilities.
“We are finding our footing in the market,” Iorio said. “We started actually having projects fully realized in the world.”
Per Iorio, the largest barrier to adoption right now is spare time to trial new tech, which he said many of the folks Augmenta pitches do not possess. To overcome this hurdle, Augmenta has been working closely with clients on initial projects to operate its software and demonstrate the results it can produce.
Iorio said Augmenta aims to use this funding to “reach the next stage of product-market fit” and help propel the company towards a larger Series A round.
To get there, it intends to improve the efficiency of its electrical agent and develop “at least an initial proof point” that its software can handle design for other types of building systems beyond just electrical.
Augmenta plans to use this latest capital to refine its electrical agent and begin developing comparable capabilities for mechanical and plumbing—“stepping stones” on its path to eventually automating the design of entire buildings, Iorio said.
The startup intends to expand its engineering team, build out its support and sales functions, and add another 10 to 15 employees to its 40-person workforce by the end of 2025 to support these goals.