The population of cities across the world is expected to grow by 2.5 billion in the next 30 years.
How will already-crowded urban areas fit all those extra people? That’s what Spacemaker is trying to figure out.
Spacemaker is a company using AI software to simulate and optimize how buildings and structures would fit in a building site. The company’s technology lets engineers, real estate developers and architects go through multiple site proposals and sort out the best ones.
On Monday, Spacemaker announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Atomico and Northzone. The company said that it will use this funding to accelerate the rollout of its product and grow its engineering and commercial teams.
“Today, developers, architects and urban planners only have the tools to explore a few options for building design as they try to optimize for everything from environmental factors to regulations,” Spacemaker CEO and co-founder Håvard Haukeland said in a statement.
He continued: “With Spacemaker they can, for the first time, generate and assess billions of possible solutions to multi-building residential development design in only hours. We’re proud to partner with Atomico and Northzone who are fully aligned with our global mission of empowering the industry to build better and more sustainable cities using AI.”
Although Spacemaker started in Oslo, Norway, the company also has an office in Cambridge, Mass. — adjacent to MIT. Both MIT and Spacemaker share a focus on the importance of technology and urban planning.
MIT has created a degree called “Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science,” where students learn how to use computational tools in the realm of urban planning.
“A city is a reflection of society’s values,” said MIT urban science faculty Ira Winder in a Spacemaker video. “If [students] don’t have that literacy [between urban planning theory and computer science], they aren’t effective arbitrators of the urban environment.”
