Buildcheck, an AI-powered design review platform, announced on September 30 that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Telescope Partners, with participation from WND Ventures [the corporate venture arm of DPR Construction] and subsequent participation from existing investors Uncork Capital, Salt VC and Xfund. The round comes just nine months after Buildcheck’s $5.9 million seed round and brings total funding to $18 million.
Construction tech startups continue to set investment records as the sector has surged through the pandemic years. Global investment in contech reached a record $6.57 billion across 337 deals by 2025, according to Cemex Ventures.
ENR raised Series A funding from Buildcheck last year and has grown steadily as co-founder and CEO Alexander Michalatos further refined the platform and the AI assistance it brings to review construction plans. Michalatos was previously mechanical and electrical manager at EllisDon and co-founded Buildcheck with Andrei Molchynsky and Alex Gureev. Michalatos said the Series A raise would further expand its AI assistance capabilities. Buildcheck has proprietary computer vision models, developed by Michalatos and Gureev, that check drawings for errors, omissions, and coordination conflicts.
“I was doing hospital design-builds in Canada, so obviously we would take all the design risk,” he says of the impetus to start Buildcheck. “We would track both the architects and engineers, as well as the trades. I was doing the MEP IT field, all the technical fields, which are extremely interdisciplinary by nature.”
Michalatos said the platform’s success over the past year showed that contractors can rely on a computer vision model to do work that was once reserved entirely for human reviewers who, frankly, are overworked in his opinion.
“Automated design reviews are now becoming a market standard,” he says. “We’re giving every project what I wanted when I was managing my own hospital designs: a tireless colleague who understands the whole project, with a seamless platform to bring everyone together in one place to get things done.”
For WND, the investment follows a successful pilot and evidence of platform refinement.
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“You know our process, we try things on a small scale in a proof-of-concept environment, and our goal is to understand if something is going to help us in a big way in our workplaces,” says Kaushal Diwan, a board member at WND Ventures. “If things go well, we try to do more POCs and pilots before we look at scaling to the whole business.”
Diwan said what was interesting about Buildcheck specifically was that his team improved capabilities very quickly, “that was a good indicator of their ability to meet customer demand and in terms of what we needed. When we start to align with the core pieces of our strategy when it comes to design to build, that’s actually a really big indicator for us that maybe it’s time to open the door.”
