French startup Davis raises €4.6 million for AI-powered architectural design
Davis, a Paris-based real estate company, announced a €4.6 million pre-Seed funding round led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital. The startup uses AI to compress early-stage architectural design from weeks and months into hours and days.
Co-founders Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi launched Davis in 2025 to address a specific problem: real estate development workflows move slowly despite the industry's scale. The company combines proprietary AI with human review to deliver architect-grade outputs faster.
How Gaudi-1 works
Davis introduced Gaudi-1, its first model for generating architectural designs under real-world constraints. Unlike traditional AI models that work in continuous pixel space, Gaudi-1 operates in discrete architectural space-generating buildings as structured compositions of rooms, walls, and layouts.
This approach provides greater control over outputs and faster iteration cycles. The model incorporates regulatory, technical, and market data as constraints, covering site limitations, return on investment, volumetrics, floor plans, and space planning.
Human architects review each output before delivery. Davis says the model has achieved state-of-the-art results on established benchmarks including RPLAN and MSD.
Service-based business model
Rather than selling software, Davis delivers finished architectural outputs directly to developers and investors through a service model. The technology adapts to local regulations and works across different property types and geographies.
The startup currently collaborates with developers and expects to support hundreds of projects in the coming year. It plans to expand research, hire additional staff, and deepen its focus on the real estate process.
Max Niederhofer, partner at Heartcore Capital, said the combination of three elements makes Davis distinctive: a generative model operating in discrete architectural space under regulatory constraints, architect-led validation, and the compression of timelines from months to days.
Additional investors in the round included Yellow, Evantic, and Entrepreneurs First, along with angels from the founding teams of SpaceMaker, Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, Supabase, Cleo, and Spore.bio.
For professionals in real estate and construction, understanding how AI tools like Gaudi-1 fit into development workflows matters. Learn more about AI for Real Estate & Construction to explore how these technologies are being applied across the industry.
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