Continuum Industries raises £1.5 million to bring the construction industry into the digital age

Edinburgh-based Continuum Industries, a startup that provides AI tools for engineering professionals, has closed a £1.5 million financing round to make its technology available to infrastructure planning and design teams across the globe.

The seed round was co-led by London's Playfair Capital and Prague-based Credo Ventures with participation from Techstart Ventures, Simon Blakey, Michael Blakey and others.

The startup's founders originally met at the University of Edinburgh’s Hyperloop Team in 2016, but it wasn't until 2018 when they set up Continuum Industries - with a little help and a £250,000 check from Skyscanner co-founder Gareth Williams.

Today, Continuum Industries offers software that enables its users to automate their existing engineering design processes, and use artificial intelligence to explore millions of design options in rich detail to allow infrastructure planning and design teams to significantly cut down the time - and ultimately the money - spent on early-stage design work.

Grzegorz Marecki, the CEO and co-founder of the company, said: "Before founding Continuum Industries, we led a 150-people strong hyperloop team at the University of Edinburgh. While there, we built the UK’s first hyperloop prototype vehicle and successfully competed in contests run by SpaceX and Virgin Hyperloop One. It was the hyperloop moonshot that made us realise the socio-economic value of infrastructure and forced us to think about better ways of taking infrastructure projects from ideas to reality."

"Infrastructure like roads, water pipelines or transmission lines is fundamental to our modern way of life and to the global economy. Yet, nine out of ten infrastructure projects are behind schedule or over budget. What’s more, productivity of the construction industry has not increased in the last thirty years," he continued.

Fun fact via Playfair Capital's Chris Smith on Twitter; apparently the investment is a result from a 'cold' inbound LinkedIn message sent to him by the team.