Franklin raises €200,000 to make buildings programmable
WHAT IF, a technology and real estate agency, is building a true digital twin for buildings
In software, it’s taken for granted that every change is traceable, every version can be restored, and you can query the current state of the system at any moment. The construction sector has nothing like it. Yet.
A building project lives in hundreds of files whose versions get lost, and from the moment the building is completed, its digital description starts drifting away from reality. What gets called a “digital twin” is, at best, a digital snapshot of the past.
Franklin, developed by WHAT IF, has raised a €200,000 pre-seed investment to change that. Franklin’s vision is a building whose digital model stays in sync with reality throughout its entire lifecycle, from design to facility management, and which you can ask, in plain language, at any moment, what is going on and what has changed. We call such a building “programmable”: a change in design or operations is no longer weeks of manual work, but a fast, traceable action – just like in software.
In the software world, this problem was solved with version control almost twenty years ago.
In construction, we still check what changed between two drawings by hand, and that takes an enormous amount of time that nobody on a project has.
Our goal is for a building’s digital description to be as alive as the building itself.
That sounds big, but it starts in a very concrete place: making a change and seeing its impact should take minutes, not weeks.
Maria Freimann
Co-founder and CEO of WHAT IF and Franklin
We started where the pain is greatest: changes and versions. Franklin automatically compares versions of project files, detects changes, and keeps project knowledge in one place.
The investment goes where vision meets reality: version comparison and change tracking have to work with the real chaos of real projects.
Once that foundation is in place, everything else – digital twins, a building you can query in plain language – can be built on top of it.
Justin Clapperton
CTO of Franklin
The platform grew out of WHAT IF’s more than ten years of development consulting experience and is in daily use today across all of WHAT IF’s own projects.
We didn’t need market research to know what the problem was.
For ten years we’ve watched project information live in emails, in people’s memories and on someone’s laptop.
Franklin was born because we no longer wanted to work that way ourselves. The fact that our first investor came from the construction sector tells me more than any pitch deck.
Maria Freimann
With the investment, Franklin will focus on scaling the product: onboarding new clients and further developing the data architecture on which tools will be built to significantly speed up the day-to-day processes of project and building management.