Davis, a French AI startup building tools for early-stage real estate development, has raised $5.5 million in a pre-seed round.
Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital led the fundraise, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Yellow and Evantic, alongside angels from SpaceMaker, Hugging Face, Black Forest Labs, Cleo, Spore.bio, and Supabase.
Founded in 2025 by Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi, who met through Entrepreneurs First. Rais grew up in a family of architects in Morocco, while Chraibi trained in generative modelling at École Polytechnique.
“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,” says Rais.
Moving from site analysis to architectural concept currently requires multiple stakeholders, fragmented software, and workflows that can take weeks or months. Davis compresses that into a single integrated process by transforming regulatory, technical, and market data into constraints that its systems use to generate feasibility studies, as well as architectural designs, including volumetrics, floor plans, and space planning. Human experts review each output before delivery, keeping architectural judgment in the loop while removing the coordination overhead.
“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,” adds Max Niederhofer, partner at Heartcore Capital.
The closest comparisons are Testfit, a US-based feasibility automation tool, and Arcol, which focuses on collaborative architectural modelling. Davis’ distinction is its service model: rather than selling software licences, it delivers finished outputs directly to developers and investors, combining AI speed with human validation.
“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,” says Rob Moffat, partner at Balderton Capital.
The fresh capital will be used to expand research, accelerate hiring and scale the platform to support hundreds of projects over the next year. With this, the company is positioning itself to set a new speed standard for early-stage development, transforming how projects move from concept to reality.
