aec-technology
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Jessie Huang Is Giving Designers Their Hours Back
D5's CMO built her case for AI from the least glamorous place in software: the hours between an idea and a finished scene. Her answer is practical, creator-first, and rooted in years spent close to users.
Eileen Canady Is Giving AEC’s AI Conversation a Human Voice
The English major who learned finance now translates AI for an industry built on precision - with research, disciplined storytelling and a microphone passed to the people doing the work.
Andriy Mulyar Is Teaching AI to Read the Blueprints
The Nomic founder went from clinical language models to open-source AI on a laptop. Now he is narrowing the map, building agents that can navigate the drawings, specifications and institutional memory behind the physical world.
Clifton Harness
Clifton Harness is the co-founder and CEO of TestFit, a Dallas-based real estate feasibility platform that lets developers, architects and contractors solve site plans in seconds instead of weeks. A University of Texas at Austin architecture graduate who grew up around his father's development business, Harness spent two years doing site plan test fits at StreetLights Residential before teaming up with his college roommate, software developer Ryan Griege, to automate the repetitive work. TestFit has raised roughly $22 million, led by a $20 million Series A from Parkway Venture Capital, and Harness has become a leading and often provocative voice on generative design in the AEC industry.
Vardhan Mehta
Vardhan Mehta is the co-founder and CEO of Acelab, the company behind Material Hub, an AI platform that helps architects discover, evaluate, and specify building products. A former architect who worked on U.S. embassy envelopes and projects at MIT and Yale, he traded the drafting table for a database after watching designers burn hours hunting through PDFs and spec sheets. Acelab now serves more than 20,000 architecture and design firms in North America, raised a $13.5M Series A in October 2025 led by Navitas Capital, and landed Mehta on Forbes 30 Under 30. His bet: AI can finally absorb the complexity of every material decision in the built environment.