Paris-based Davis has closed a €4.6 million ($5.5 million) pre-seed round to build AI that compresses early-stage real estate development timelines from months to days. Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital co-led the round, according to EU-Startups, with participation from Yellow, Evantic, and Entrepreneurs First. Angel investors from the founding teams of Hugging Face, Black Forest Labs, Supabase, SpaceMaker, Cleo, and Spore.bio also contributed.
Alongside the funding, Davis is launching Gaudi-1, its first proprietary model for generating architectural designs under regulatory constraints. The model operates in discrete architectural space, producing structured compositions of rooms, walls, and layouts rather than working in continuous pixel space like conventional diffusion models. Davis says Gaudi-1 has achieved state-of-the-art results on established floor-plan generation benchmarks including RPLAN and MSD.
How It Works
Founded in 2025 by CEO Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi, Davis transforms regulatory, technical, and market data into constraints for feasibility studies and architectural designs covering volumetrics, floor plans, and space planning. Human architects review each output before delivery.
“Real estate is one of the world’s largest asset classes, yet some of its most important workflows still move at a pace that no longer makes sense,” Rais told EU-Startups. “We started Davis to set a new time standard for real estate development and ultimately to reshape how cities are designed and built.”
The company sells outputs as a service rather than licensing software, adapting to local regulations across geographies and asset classes. It is currently collaborating with developers and expects to support hundreds of projects in the coming year.
Architecture AI Draws Capital
Davis is the second architecture-focused AI startup to close a pre-seed round this week. Vienna-based Synaps raised $3.6 million for an AI-native CAD alternative targeting architects with 20+ agent-powered design tools. The back-to-back raises signal growing investor confidence that architectural design, long resistant to automation due to regulatory complexity and the need for domain expertise, is ready for AI-driven compression.
Max Niederhofer, Partner at Heartcore Capital, pointed to the reinforcing loop between Davis’s technical approach and its business model: “A generative model operating in a discrete architectural space under regulatory constraints, an architect-in-the-loop validation layer, and the resulting compression from months to days in an industry where time drives returns,” he told EU-Startups.
Davis plans to use the funding to expand research, accelerate hiring, and further integrate the real estate development workflow from site analysis to architectural concept into a single automated process.