Didimi, a digital twins and information management platform for the construction industry, announced that it has raised €880k in a pre-seed investment. The round is led by the leading deep tech VC the Creator Fund. The fresh capital will serve to expand its B2B product offering into the construction information management sector.
Founded in 2023 as a spin-off from the University of Cambridge, Didimi is a London-based startup that is building a new platform to transform information exchange and management in the construction industry.
Didimi was founded by two ex-Palantir engineers, Dr. Kyriakos D. Kantarakias and Alexander Gillies, as well as Ioannis Brilakis, who is the Laing O’Rourke Professor of Civil and Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
Dr. Kyriakos D. Kantarakias, Founder and CEO of Didimi, said: “Our mission at Didimi is to transform the way information is exchanged and managed across construction stakeholders. When architects and engineers exchange models in the current format, huge information loss occurs due to the fundamental interoperability problems in the industry, leading to time waste and mistakes. The Didimi platform is our ambitious answer to this problem. We are extremely grateful to have found the right investors that can back us in this vision and help us change these antiquated practices in the industry.”
The Didimi platform allows engineers and designers from all disciplines to easily exchange construction models of any format without losing data. Information from the shared models can be accessed, viewed and edited by any design software, regardless which tool was used to create it.
Jamie Macfarlane, Founder and CEO of Creator Fund, added: “At Creator Fund we believe in backing PhD and academic founders from day 1. We have known Kyriakos for a number of years and are thrilled to now lead Didimi’s pre-seed. Didimi’s team combines Kyriakos’ and Alex’s ambition and talent and Prof. Brilakis’s world renowned expertise in the digital twin space. Their partnership with Cambridge University’s Digital Roads of the Future initiative provides a unique entry point to transform construction workflows as we know them.”
Prof. Ioannis Brilakis, Chief Scientist and Chairman of Didimi, further commented: “There are over 266 talking shops in the UK’s construction industry; a world record. A lot of talking, but not enough doing. At Cambridge, our ethos is that we can’t expect an industry of 2% profit margins to innovate for us; we have to step up to the plate and do it ourselves. I am proud to work side by side with Kyriakos and Alex to make the full potential of digital twins a reality for the construction industry. Our dynamic graph solution, able to link existing sources of information with an ever growing array of authoring tools, is the first to offer lossless interoperability as a service to the sector, and sets the scene for dependable twin systems for the built environment.”
