Antler announces pre-seed investment in Struck AI
May 22, 2024
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Antler, the world’s most active early-stage VC firm, has today announced that it is investing €100K into Benelux-based start-up Struck. Struck allows Architects, Developers, and General Contractors to master the maze of building regulations and therefore save time, cut costs, and build with confidence. In addition to Antler’s investment, Struck has recently received the Rabank Innovation Loan of €150K to further build out the product suite.
The Biggest Challenge Of Our Time
In a time of housing crisis, every possible delay should be eliminated - compliance to building regulations as this process is expensive & time-consuming, impacting a project’s risk, timeline, and cost. Time to construction from site selection can be as high as 8 years due to a regulatory maze & compliance-related issues found only at the later stages of a project.
Struck is an AI-assisted compliance platform that will save 10-40% on time to construction and 5-15% of the project budget. Struck simplifies the regulatory maze by providing unified & intuitive access to project-relevant regulations. In addition, Struck will perform automated, fast checks right where the decisions are made. Struck has already created a vast library of documents that can be accessed in the Netherlands and the UK. In addition, Struck has managed to generate 3D AI-generated building volumes for plots in the Netherlands.
Ronald Jan Schuurs, partner at Antler comments, “We always like startups that are able to solve nagging and frustrating problems in an industry. Adhering to the ever increasing rules and regulations for buildings is becoming a major challenge. The need for the rules is clearly there, however with the current challenges in the real estate industry, anything that can be done to speed up the process and reduce costs, is sorely needed. Applying AI in this space with vast amounts of unstructured data is a major step forward to streamline the process.”
About Struck Team
The founders of Struck are Nikhil Nagaraj and Max van Riel. Struck’s two founders met during Antler’s first Central European residency in Amsterdam in the autumn of 2023. Nikhil studied at KU Leuven and started his career as an AI/ML engineer at ML6 in Gent Belgium. Max started his career at ING in the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain, then cofounded the in-company mobile payments startup Payconiq in Belgium and the Netherlands. Afterwards, he moved to the security and property technology industry at Eagle Eye Networks.
As Max explains: “It is exceptional to see how we could delight architects and developers not only with our idea but also with the first version of our AI Assistant from week 1 in the Antler cohort. Everybody in this space has used AI to generate some nice images, however, to use it directly in a practical sense for rules and regulations had not been done before. This was for us a testament that we should pursue this challenge in the AEC industry and see where we can provide additional value for one of the biggest markets on the globe.”
Ends
Photography of the founding team is available here.
Media Contacts:
Jack Davies
Antler, European Marketing & PR Director
+44 7872 169 072
Max van Riel
Struck, Co-Founder
+31-6 42053703
More information about Struck - www.struck.build
About Antler
Antler is the world’s day zero investor that inspires, enables, and invests in visionary founders everywhere. Founded on the belief that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not, we remove the barriers to entrepreneurship so more people can launch sustainable businesses that solve meaningful problems, drive innovation, and improve lives. We partner with the most early-stage entrepreneurs around the world through our residencies in 27 cities across six continents—Austin, Berlin, Bangalore, Jakarta, London, New York, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, and beyond. As an extension of our founders’ team, our global community backs them from the beginning and keeps backing them with team formation, deep business model validation, initial capital, global scaling, and follow-on funding, with a personal passion that goes beyond traditional investing. To date, we have brought more than 1,200 startups into existence that are delivering paradigm-shifting solutions across all industries, with the goal of backing more than 6,000 by 2030.
