Cove.tool, a startup offering tools that ensure buildings are sustainable from the start, announced raising a $30 million Series B led by Coatue, according to a press release.
The company, which launched its beta in August 2017, says it will use the new funding to expand its suite of products and provide carbon reduction analysis for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. It also says it will add to its 60-person team.
New investor Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition and previous investors Mucker Capital, Urban Us and Knoll Ventures also participated in the round, which brings cove.tool’s total funding to $36.8 million.
The company previously raised a $100,000 pre-seed round led by TechSquare Labs in 2018, $950,000 in two seed funding rounds and a $5.7 million Series A led by Mucker Capital in 2020.
Cove.tool’s machine learning-based tool suite assists design and construction professionals to decrease carbon usage, with the company claiming it has already helped industry players avoid five times more carbon than Tesla in 2021. It also states it has already offset 28.5 million tons of carbon this year.
“Buildings’ operations and their construction are one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions annually. As the effects of climate change intensify and countries target net-zero emissions by 2050, the AEC industry needs new, data-driven tools to build affordable, net-zero buildings,” cove.tool co-founder and CEO Sandeep Ahuja stated in the release.
The company’s foundational energy modeling tool also enables builders to compare and achieve targets across energy, daylight, glare, radiation, water and embodied carbon segments. More than 25,000 projects and 15,000 people have used the sustainable building software since launch, with the energy modeling tool being used by over 3,000 users in the first three weeks of launch, according to TechCrunch.
Despite the cove.tool not yet being profitable, Ahuja says it could be if it stopped its scaling operations. The company also plans to use funding to scale sales and marketing in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and the EU.
“By combining energy efficiency, design and transparency for material selection cove.tool addresses this massive problem,” investor Robert Downey Jr. told TechCrunch. “It’s a prime example of a scalable business that employs machine learning and principled leadership to literally build a better future.”
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