Infrared City: The AI Co-Pilot for Sustainable Architecture

Company & Team Introduction

Headquartered in Vienna, Austria, Infrared City is an innovative AI-powered platform built by a team of approximately 15 professionals dedicated to revolutionizing the AEC industry. The company's mission is to democratize complex environmental analysis, making it accessible and rapid for architects and urban planners. The leadership is a formidable blend of deep academic insight in computational design and elite software engineering experience from world-renowned architectural firms. This unique combination of expertise ensures the platform is not only technically robust but also intuitively aligned with the real-world workflows of designers.

• Angelos Chronis (CEO & Co-Founder): Angelos provides the strategic vision and deep domain expertise for Infrared City. His credentials include a PhD in Architectural Design, an MSc from UCL, and extensive experience as Senior Faculty at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and former Head of the City Intelligence Lab at the Austrian Institute of Technology. His background firmly roots the company's product in cutting-edge architectural research and urban intelligence.

• Christos Chatzakis (CTO & Co-Founder): Christos leads the technological development of the platform, bringing a wealth of software engineering and computational design experience. He holds a Master of Architecture in Computational Design from UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and has honed his skills at world-class firms, including as a Computational Designer at Foster + Partners and a Senior Software Engineer at Bryden Wood. His expertise ensures the platform is built with sophisticated, scalable, and resilient technology.

Product Overview

Infrared City acts as an AI co-pilot for environmental design, seamlessly integrating into the architect's existing toolkit to provide powerful analysis without disrupting the creative process. The platform is built on four core pillars that transform weeks of work into minutes. It allows designers to test, iterate, and validate their ideas with data-driven confidence from the earliest stages of a project. This approach ensures that performance and sustainability are not afterthoughts but are woven into the fabric of the design itself, leading to superior outcomes for both occupants and the environment.

• Rapid Environmental Simulations: The platform runs complex analyses for Solar Radiation, Daylight Availability, Wind Comfort, and Microclimate in minutes, providing immediate visual and quantitative feedback on a design's performance.

• Seamless CAD/BIM Integration: With direct connectors for popular software like Rhino, Revit, and SketchUp, users can send their models to the cloud for analysis with a single click, eliminating tedious import/export cycles.

• Conversational AI Assistant: Beyond just data, the AI Assistant helps users interpret simulation results, ask natural language questions (e.g., "How can I improve daylight on the lower floors?"), and receive actionable design suggestions.

• Automated AI Reports: Instantly generates comprehensive, customizable, and shareable reports with high-quality visualizations, streamlining communication with clients, regulators, and other stakeholders.

Market Opportunity

Infrared City is strategically positioned to capture a significant share of the rapidly expanding market for sustainable building technologies. The global push for climate-resilient infrastructure is creating enormous demand for tools that can optimize environmental design. This market is not a small niche; the global green building market is projected to grow from approximately $330 billion in 2024 to over $600 billion by 2030, driven by a powerful combination of regulatory pressure and market demand. Infrared City's solution directly addresses the most significant barrier to widespread adoption: the speed and cost of analysis.

• Massive Addressable Market: The platform operates within the multi-trillion-dollar global AEC industry and more specifically targets the Building Information Modeling (BIM) market, which is expected to surpass $25 billion by 2032, growing at over 12% annually.

• Regulatory & ESG Tailwinds: Increasingly stringent building codes, net-zero mandates, and corporate ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) requirements are forcing developers and designers to prioritize and prove environmental performance.

• Solving the Analysis Bottleneck: The traditional workflow for environmental analysis is a major industry pain point. It is slow, requires expensive consultants, and delivers feedback too late in the design process to be truly effective.

• Democratizing High-Performance Design: By making analysis instantaneous and affordable, Infrared City empowers every architect to iterate on sustainable strategies from day one, fundamentally improving the quality and value of the final building.

Business Model & Traction

Infrared City operates on a clear Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model with tiered monthly and annual subscription plans designed for different user scales. This model provides predictable revenue while offering customers flexibility. Monetization is centered around AI Credits, which are consumed when users run simulations or generate reports, directly tying cost to usage. This structure allows solo practitioners and large firms alike to choose a plan that fits their project volume and collaborative needs. The platform's transparent pricing and feature differentiation create a clear path for customers to scale up as their demands grow.

• Personal Plan (€43/month, billed yearly): Designed for individuals, offering 1,000 AI Credits/month, 3 concurrent projects, and full access to all simulation models and AI features.

• Team Plan (€213/month, billed yearly): Aimed at small, collaborative teams, this plan includes 5,000 AI Credits/month, 20 concurrent projects, shared project capabilities, and priority support.

• Pro Plan (€425/month, billed yearly): The top-tier offering for businesses, providing 10,000 AI Credits/month, 50 concurrent projects, priority new location requests, API access, and live support.

Since launching its platform in October 2024, Infrared City has demonstrated impressive early traction and market validation. In just the final quarter of last year, the company successfully onboarded its first few hundred users and secured partnerships with over 20 architecture firms, signaling strong initial product-market fit. This momentum was amplified by significant industry recognition, with Infrared City earning multiple awards in 2024, including being named “Most Innovative Climate Adaptations Company” in Austria and being selected as one of the top 100 startups at the prestigious Slush 2024 competition. This early success fueled rapid internal growth, with the core team expanding from 4 to 11 members by year-end, setting a strong foundation for its continued expansion in 2025.

Competitors

Infrared City enters a competitive landscape not by challenging a single rival, but by disrupting a deeply entrenched and inefficient status quo. Its true competition is the traditional, fragmented workflow that has defined architectural practice for decades. By creating a holistic, intuitive, and AI-powered solution, it offers a fundamentally new way of working that directly addresses the shortcomings of existing tools and processes.

• Traditional Consultants & Workflows: The primary alternative is outsourcing analysis to specialized engineering consultants. This process is slow, expensive, and creates a disconnect between the design team and the performance data.

• Complex Desktop Software: Expert-level desktop tools like IESVE or open-source scripts like Ladybug for Grasshopper are powerful but require a steep learning curve and significant time investment, making them inaccessible to many designers for day-to-day use.

• Other SaaS Platforms: Companies like Spacemaker AI (Autodesk) and Cove.tool also offer cloud-based building analysis. These platforms are strong competitors in the space of automating design and analysis.

• Infrared City's Defensible Moat: The platform's unique advantage lies in its positioning as an AI co-pilot. Its combination of a simple UI, seamless CAD integration, and a conversational AI Assistant that helps interpret results and automate reporting creates a uniquely fluid and supportive user experience.

Funding

Infrared City successfully secured €1 million in a Pre-Seed funding round announced on October 10, 2023. This crucial initial investment provides the capital to expand its team and accelerate product development. The round was backed by a strong syndicate of five investors, with xista science ventures leading. Participation from other key firms such as Antler, HEARTFELT, 2bX, and P3A Ventures demonstrates significant investor confidence in the company's vision and its potential to disrupt the architectural design market.