Malmö-based startup Finch has secured €2.5 million in a seed round led by Nordic VC firm Inventure with the participation of notable angels such as Peter Neubauer (co-founder of Mapillary and Neo4j) and Emil Sjödin (co-founder of Refined). The startup offers a cloud-based collaboration platform that enables users to avoid costly and time-consuming errors in the early stage of a project. With the funding, Finch will be able to build the next-gen design tool and launch the product.
“We’ve evaluated over 200 Proptech companies in the Nordics and Baltics, and Finch is the team we have been looking for. Finch’s founders combine a deep understanding of the problems in this industry, mixed with a SaaS and global growth mindset.” says Lauri Kokkila, Partner at Inventure.
Finch was founded in early 2020 by Pamela Nunez Wallgren, Jesper Wallgren and Martin Kretz to empower architects, engineers and constructors to build better cities by making more informed decisions in early-stage planning. Their AI-powered tools helps users optimize their plans with little effort after making even a small change that would affect the whole project’s wellbeing, like moving a wall.
“As architects ourselves, my co-founder and I have first-hand experience of the pain of not having access to the kind of modern planning tools that we take for granted in all other industries. Instead of working collaboratively on a project in the cloud, we’d have to send projects as saved files back and forth between ourselves and external partners while manually visualising different floor plans and their constraints.
With Finch, everyone involved in a project is able to see how different rules and regulations impact the building and its potential inside and out from the get-go.” says Pamela Wallgren, co-founder and CEO.
The idea was born from a pure years-old frustration that any other person may come across with the small but annoying, time-consuming details during their projects. After seaching the right product for years, founding team got together and started building their own. Now, even in their closed-beta phase, the startup already have 12,000 customers across the world including the award-winning firms Herzog & de Meuron and White Arkitekter.
Peter Leuchovius, CIO at White Arkitekter, says “The age of computational design is here and we want to be in the forefront. By using scripting, simulations and generative tools we inform our proposals in the early stages. This allows us to make better design decisions where they are most needed and necessary to deliver sustainable architecture.”
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