By Image Credit,The Bridge

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Prefab, a developer of AI SaaS for the construction industry, announced on the 16th that it has raised ¥41.5 million in a seed round. The lead investor is ANOBAKA, with participation from East Ventures, mint, and four angel investors. The funds raised will primarily be used to strengthen recruitment, enhance AI algorithms, and accelerate business expansion.

In the construction industry, only 12% of the workforce is under the age of 29, making the transfer of skills due to an aging workforce an urgent issue. The cloud-based tool provided by the company automatically recognizes materials by simply uploading construction drawings, significantly reducing the time required for quantity takeoff. According to the company, this tool aims to solve the problem faced by construction companies of “losing business opportunities due to time-consuming estimates,” by greatly streamlining estimation work that traditionally could take up to six months.

By combining high-precision object detection and OCR, and refining inference speed and UI to a level usable on-site, the company aims to improve productivity in the construction industry, which continues to face a severe shortage of skilled workers. Leveraging its strengths as a startup originating from the University of Tokyo, Prefab is developing a proprietary model specialized for architectural and equipment drawings.

With the funds raised, the company plans to hire across a wide range of positions, including CxO, engineers, and business development, while expanding the functionality of its drawing analysis AI and extending its application to other operations.

Since its founding in 2023, Prefab has continued product development with investment from East Ventures, and this marks the second publicized round of funding.

via PR TIMES