A year after getting an investment from Prologis, a global real estate logistics leader, Dallas-based TestFit is showing the company what it can do with its real-time AI platform for real estate feasibility.

San Francisco-based Prologis Ventures invested in a $20 million June 2022 Series A round for TestFit with Dallas-based Perot Jain and New York-based Parkway Venture Capital, Prologis said. That followed Parkway’s $2 million seed funding investment in TestFit in 2020. 

Prologis has now deployed TestFit’s real-time AI platform to help the company “better judge the feasibility of new warehouse sites,” TestFit announced Wednesday.

TestFit’s real estate feasibility platform provides insights into design, constructability, and costs in early-stage site planning. The Dallas startup says its 40-member team works with “50% of the top 10 multi-family developers today.”

Speeding up site planning ‘by as much as 10 times’

[Image: TestFit]

“Prologis is a great case study on how meaningful AI can supercharge the feasibility process,” Clifton Harness, co-founder and CEO of TestFit, said in a statement. “TestFit has helped existing customers speed up their site planning by as much as 10 times. It’s incredible to see the success we’ve seen in multi-family applied in the industrial space.”

Harness was one of Dallas Innovates’ 2023 picks for “The Future 50 in Dallas-Fort Worth” earlier this year.

TestFit was launched in 2016 by Harness and Ryan Griege, the company’s chief technology officer. According to the Dallas Morning News, the two teamed up while attending the University of Texas, after Harness realized the lack of technology and innovation in the space while serving as an assistant design manager at Dallas developer StreetLights Residential.

TestFit co-founders Clifton Harness, CEO (left), and Ryan Griege, CTO (right).

Last year, Harness said TestFit was the first company to connect pro forma, construction cost, and asset design through its building configurator software—enabling companies to “de-risk decisions” and log critical time savings when they develop new commodity real estate.

Prologis Ventures, the venture arm of Prologis, has focused its investment strategy on innovative solutions that help solve “the most critical pain points in areas such as operations, sustainability, energy, and construction.” TestFit said Prologis has been piloting its platform  to give its teams “real-time insights on design, evaluation of constructability, and forecasting of costs for new logistics sites.”

“Innovation and staying ahead of what’s next has been fundamental to our company’s 40-year success,” Will O’Donnell, managing director of Prologis Ventures, said in a statement. “TestFit is a perfect example of how we continually invest in new technologies such as AI that empower our employees.”

Part of the TestFit team. [Photo: TestFit]

Partnership to be profiled in upcoming webinar

The TestFit-Prologis partnership will be profiled in an October 26 webinar titled, “It’s Time to Get AI-Ready in Real Estate Development,” hosted by Harness and O’Donnell.

Before that happens, TestFit says its chief product officer, Kyle Bernhardt, will be a speaker at Prologis’s annual thought leadership forum on September 27 in San Francisco, to be streamed globally. Bernhardt will participate on the “The Supply Chain Is Still the Supply Chain, Until AI Steps In” panel.

With a Dallas-based team of 40, TestFit has won some accolades lately. It won a 2023 PropTech BreakThrough Award earlier this year for Overall Construction Tech Solution Of The Year. It also made the list of Top AI-Powered Tools for the Building Industry from aec+tech.

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