Davis raises $5.5 million pre-seed to accelerate early-stage real estate development from months to days

Davis, an AI-native real estate company accelerating early-stage development and architectural design, today announced a $5.5 million pre-seed round. The round was led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital, with participation from Yellow, Evantic and Entrepreneurs First, alongside angels from the founding teams of SpaceMaker, Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, Supabase, Cleo and Spore.bio.

Real estate development is one of the world’s largest industries — and one of its slowest. Early-stage design and development processes still take weeks or months, relying on fragmented workflows and decades-old software. A new generation of AI companies is moving beyond tools to deliver outcomes directly, and Davis is leading this shift.

Alongside the funding, the company is also introducing Gaudi-1, its first model for generating architectural designs under real-world constraints.

A fragmented industry meets a new generation of AI companies

Founded by Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi, Davis is building a new kind of real estate company, combining proprietary AI with human expertise to deliver actionable outputs far faster than traditional workflows. Its core proposition is simple: compress early-stage development timelines from months to days, while keeping humans in the loop.

The company turns regulatory, technical and market data into constraints used to generate feasibility studies — from site constraints to ROI — and architectural designs, including volumetrics, floor plans and space planning. Human experts then review each output before delivery.

Today, moving from site analysis to architectural concept requires multiple stakeholders and fragmented workflows. Davis compresses this into a single integrated process.

From software tools to AI-native services

Davis was born from a combination of industry exposure and frontier AI research. Rais grew up in Morocco in a family of architects, giving him first-hand exposure to the inefficiencies of real estate development. Chraibi, also from Morocco, is an AI researcher from École Polytechnique specialising in generative models for structured data. The pair met through Entrepreneurs First and became one of the fastest teams in their cohort to raise funding.

At the core of Davis’ technology is a new approach to generative modelling for the built environment. Unlike traditional diffusion models that operate in continuous pixel space, Davis’ systems operate in a discrete space, generating buildings as structured compositions of architectural elements such as rooms, walls and layouts. This enables significantly greater control, faster iteration and outputs that reliably satisfy real-world requirements across regulatory, financial and design dimensions.

Davis is also introducing Gaudi-1, its first proprietary model for automated architectural generation under regulatory constraints, achieving state-of-the-art results on established floor-plan generation benchmarks, including RPLAN and MSD, across IoU, FID and KID metrics.

Instead of selling software, Davis uses this technology through a service model to deliver finished outputs directly to developers and investors. This hybrid approach combines AI speed with architectural judgment, ensuring outputs meet real-world standards

The technology works across asset classes and geographies, adapting to local regulations as input data.

The company is already working with developers and expects to support hundreds of projects over the next year, as it expands research, accelerates hiring and continues to verticalise the real estate process.

Mehdi Rais, co-founder and CEO of Davis, said: “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. We started Davis to set a new time standard for real estate development and ultimately to reshape how cities are designed and built.”

Max Niederhofer, Partner at Heartcore Capital, said: “What’s distinctive about Davis is how three elements reinforce each other: 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. We’re excited to back Mehdi and Amine as they reshape how the built world is designed and developed."

Rob Moffat, Partner at Balderton Capital, said: “There are many AI companies which are fast to market and some which are building proprietary models, but very few are doing both. After just a few months, Mehdi and Amine have acquired dozens of clients on two continents and performed cutting-edge research in discrete diffusion."