Lamarr.AI Secures $1.1 Million in Pre-Seed Funding to Revolutionize Building Diagnostics Technology

Lamarr.AI, a startup founded through collaborative research at MIT, Georgia Tech, and Syracuse University, has successfully raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round is led by Hazelview Ventures, the venture capital arm of leading Canadian real estate firm Hazelview Investments, with additional support from milemark•capital, Newlab, Georgia Tech’s Venture Fund, and MIT’s SBXi Fund. This funding will enable Lamarr.AI to develop and scale innovative tools aimed at eliminating carbon emissions while lowering building maintenance and ownership costs.

“We’ve received incredible interest from real estate companies in our technology after nearly a decade of perfecting it in the lab,” said Tarek Rakha, CEO of Lamarr.AI and Associate Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture. “By harnessing advancements in drones, thermal imaging, and AI, we can autonomously detect building defects at scale with unparalleled accuracy. This breakthrough allows property owners to address issues before they escalate into costly problems or environmentally damaging risks.”

Lamarr.AI has already collaborated with numerous building owners and facility managers, saving over $1M in engineering and construction costs by automatically identifying issues such as deteriorating window seals and leaky roofs. The technology also aids in efficiently planning and scoping large building envelope retrofits. By using innovative AI to analyze thermal images captured by drones, Lamarr.AI delivers actionable insights from building inspections far faster, more accurately, and at a lower cost than traditional manual audits. Additionally, the team can assess the impact of defects on energy loss through Building Energy Modeling (BEM), enabling ROI-driven decision-making for capital expenditure.

“We’re thrilled to lead Lamarr.AI’s pre-seed round,” said Roger Poirier, Co-Founder of Hazelview Ventures. “We invest in startups that add direct value to Hazelview’s real estate operations, and Lamarr.AI’s innovative inspection service has already made a positive impact. It exemplifies the kind of new approaches the industry needs to accelerate its journey to net-zero in a financially sustainable way.” Sebastian Barriga, Co-Founder of milemark•capital, who connected with the Lamarr.AI team at MIT more than two years ago, added: “Lamarr.AI has developed groundbreaking technology that will unlock significant efficiency gains at scale, reshaping how we design and manage building performance and energy use.”