Davis, an AI-native real estate company focused on accelerating early-stage development and architectural design workflows, announced a $5.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital. Additional investors in the round included Yellow, Evantic, and Entrepreneurs First, alongside angel investors from the founding teams of SpaceMaker, Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, Supabase, Cleo, and Spore.bio.
Davis is building AI systems designed to accelerate real estate development and architectural design processes that traditionally take weeks or months. The company combines proprietary AI models with human architectural expertise to generate feasibility studies, site analysis, floor plans, volumetrics, and space planning outputs under real-world regulatory and financial constraints.
Alongside the funding announcement, Davis introduced Gaudi-1, its first proprietary model for automated architectural design generation under regulatory constraints. According to the company, the model achieved state-of-the-art results on established floor-plan generation benchmarks including RPLAN and MSD.
Rather than operating as a traditional software company, Davis uses a service-based model that combines AI-generated outputs with expert human review before delivery to developers and investors.
Davis was founded by Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi. Rais grew up in Morocco in a family of architects, which gave him early exposure to inefficiencies in real estate development workflows. Chraibi is an AI researcher from École Polytechnique specializing in generative models for structured data. The founders met through Entrepreneurs First and became one of the fastest teams in their cohort to secure funding.
The company said its AI systems operate in a discrete architectural space, generating buildings as structured compositions of rooms, walls, and layouts instead of relying on traditional pixel-based diffusion models. Davis believes this approach enables greater design control, faster iteration, and outputs that better satisfy regulatory, financial, and design requirements.
The company is already working with developers and expects to support hundreds of projects over the next year as it expands hiring, research, and product development.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Rob Moffat, Partner, Balderton Capital
“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.”
Mehdi Rais, Co-Founder & CEO, Davis
