Build Inc., an artificial intelligence-driven startup that automates complex industrial real estate development management projects, today announced it has raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Index Ventures.

Pebblebed, Puzzle Ventures and Tiny.vc also participated in the round. A range of industry-focused angels joining the round included OpenAI Group PBC Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, Blackstone Inc. Chief Technology Officer John Stecher and senior figures from OpenAI, Meta AI Research and Google Maps.

Headquartered in New York, Build provides a platform that combines architectural and AI expertise. The company provides an AI system named Dougie, which automates complex infrastructure workflows including site sourcing, technical due diligence, power assessment and early design, helping customers reduce project timelines.

Build says Dougie compresses what would normally take humans over four weeks into about 75 minutes, rapidly prototyping the research, planning, diligence and curation for industrial real estate projects. The company said it pulls from more than 1,600 data sources and has been deployed across more than 100 projects in 15 countries for governments, Fortune 500 companies and institutional real estate groups.

“The industries shaping the physical world have spent decades trapped in process instead of creativity,” said co-founder and Chief Executive James Stirrat-Ellis. “By removing that operational burden, we can help teams move faster, make better decisions and deliver better infrastructure.”

In a blog post, the company laid out the potential for a fleet of AI agents, all working on that vast body of data, information, documents and other information that would take a number of expert human minds hours across many days to retrieve, read, critically examine and finally come to conclusions. This includes land due diligence for everything from solar farms to data centers, on regulatory interests, where water and power lines come from, how the local ecosystem is affected, what the neighboring cities and roads look like and how that affects the ability to build.

If mishandled, the company stressed, this could cost millions of dollars.

One customer, Tishman Speyer, a leading global real estate owner, developer and operator, has pivoted from building mostly office buildings to joining the recent rush to construct hyperscale data center infrastructure. In May 2024, TS entered the data center market with a 32-megawatt campus in Frankfurt, expandable to 70MW, a joint venture with data center builder Mainova WebHouse GmbH.

The explosive expansion of generative AI, high-performance computing and hyperscale cloud computing has led to rapid growth in the data center market, often described in superlative terms as a massive infrastructure supercycle. Global data center capacity is on track to double, according to a report from market analyst Jones Lang LaSalle IP Inc., which estimates that up to $3 trillion in real estate and information technology will be required by 2030 to add nearly 100 gigawatts of capacity.

That metric only examines the compute infrastructure cycle, which will drive and parallel the need to upgrade and retrofit energy grids and water delivery systems.

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