A San Francisco-based startup aiming to overhaul how building projects are planned has secured $14 million in a Seed funding round to accelerate its mission. MeltPlan, founded in 2025, will use the investment, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from noa and WND Ventures, to speed development of its AI-powered “Planning Engine”.
The company is targeting a deep-rooted and costly problem in the global construction industry, valued at $14 trillion. Projects frequently exceed their budgets by 30% and overrun schedules by 20%, a chronic issue attributed to fragmented planning where teams commit to scope, cost, and code without complete data. This leads to expensive change orders and rework later in the process.
While design tools handle aesthetics and project management software controls on-site execution, MeltPlan asserts the critical early-stage analysis of trade-offs between constraints like code, cost, schedule, and value is still performed manually and in isolation. Its AI system is designed to fill this gap by checking these constraints comprehensively before plans are ever finalised.
“MeltPlan is building an end-to-end preconstruction platform with cutting-edge AI tools that power every part of the workflow,” Jess Clemans, Principal at investor noa, stated. The company claims its proprietary AI models, built from scratch rather than fine-tuned off-the-shelf versions, achieve 93–98% accuracy. This compares to roughly 85% accuracy for standard commercial retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) platforms.
A Construction-Native Brain
The startup distinguishes its technology as a construction-native system, rejecting what it terms generic AI wrappers. Trained on industry-specific data including codebooks, specifications, drawings, and real project information, the Planning Engine is reported to score over 95% on building inspector exams. It comprises four integrated modules dedicated to code, cost, schedule, and value.
This approach, the company argues, allows for expert reasoning that genuinely understands construction methods and procurement limits. MeltPlan emphasizes full transparency in its AI decision-making, moving critical decisions earlier into the pre-construction phase to reduce risk.
The leadership team combines big-picture tech scale-up experience with deep hands-on industry knowledge. Co-founder and CEO Kanav Hasija was formerly a co-founder of the $3 billion health tech unicorn Innovaccer. His co-founder and COO, Tanmaya Kala, brings years as a project executive at DPR Construction, where he managed multimillion-dollar commercial, healthcare, and life sciences projects and was recognised among California’s Top Young Professionals in 2022.
Their stated goal is to make construction “boring” by shifting the heavy analytical lifting into planning, thereby highlighting trade-offs early to cut down on costly rework. They are applying a mindset of preventative error-catching, drawn from healthcare, to the construction sector.
Pilots and the Competitive Landscape
MeltPlan is already testing its technology in live environments through pilot programs with DPR Construction in California and with Innovo Group in the United Arab Emirates, with the aim of slashing planning errors.
The company enters a competitive field of established construction technology players but positions itself differently. Competitors like Autodesk Construction Cloud offer a suite of preconstruction solutions including BIM integration and estimating, while Procore provides tools for bid management and cost control. However, MeltPlan contends that none currently bring together pre-construction trade-off optimisation using dedicated, high-accuracy AI at scale.
The broader industry trend shows increasing adoption of AI to improve efficiency and profitability in construction. Analysis by Accenture suggests AI could boost construction industry profitability by an average of 38% by 2035, by automating tasks and providing early project insights.
Investor interest in construction tech is growing, recognising the sector’s potential for disruption. Lead investor Bessemer Venture Partners is known for backing high-growth technology firms, while WND Ventures is the venture arm of DPR Construction, focused on startups that aim to improve productivity and safety in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.
MeltPlan’s overarching vision is to transform pre-construction into the most intense and most profitable phase of a building project, aiming to finally close a productivity gap that has plagued the construction technology sector for decades.
