Augmenta brings design platform for construction industry to market

TORONTO—Augmenta, specializing in automating building design for the construction industry, recently announced it has garnered US$4.1 million in seed funding to bring to market its design platform for the construction industry, allowing contractors and engineers to design fully-detailed, code-compliant and constructible designs in hours, it states.

The round was led by Hazelview Ventures with participation from Ferguson Ventures and Whiteshell Group Inc. The funds will be used to accelerate the development of the Augmenta Construction Platform (ACP); launch a pilot program for the Electrical System Design module; and grow the Augmenta team across sales, deployment and customer support, indicates a release.

Building designs produced using ACP are also sustainable and because they are fully detailed, co-ordinated and optimized, contractors can use less material in their designs, order only what they need, and significantly reduce wasteful errors and rework. ACP optimizes building systems designs to ensure they use less energy and resources, thereby reducing environmental impact over the building’s life cycle, adds the release.

Along with the seed investment, Hazelview Ventures will be incorporating the platform in construction projects which will enable Augmenta to test, refine and scale its platform at an enterprise level and bring efficiencies to Hazelview’s design and construction processes.

In addition, Augmenta partnered with Interstates, an electrical contractor based in the U.S., which helped co-design and test the electrical module over a period of several months.

“In a very short period of time, we are seeing how dramatically Augmenta’s approach to automated design can reduce the cost of the design process,” said Josh Gillespie, BIM/VDC director at Interstates, in a statement. “It enables us to decrease the risk of inaccurately scoping time and cost estimates while drastically reducing the time it takes to complete estimates for bids. This gives us additional time to present fully considered design alternatives, thus positioning our company as a strategic partner to our clients, which include general contractors, engineering firms, developers and owners.”