Build, a startup automating pre-development workflows for data centre and infrastructure projects, has secured backing from Index Ventures. Build combines agentic AI with domain experts drawn from Blackstone, Tishman Speyer, Starwood Capital and JP Morgan to automate the work that determines whether a project is viable and on what timeline, including site sourcing, technical due diligence, power assessment and early design work.
Governments and major institutions are facing a problem where data centre development pipelines across the US and Europe are under severe pressure, with projects stalling at the earliest stages due to slow, fragmented pre-development processes that have not changed in decades. Site sourcing, technical due diligence, power assessment and early design work that currently takes weeks now takes hours using Build's systems. Build's systems orchestrate thousands of AI-driven subtasks simultaneously, with every client deliverable reviewed by experienced human operators before it reaches the client. Build sells outcomes, not software.
The scale of the challenge is visible in the policy response. In the UK, the government has established AI Growth Zones, dedicated areas designed to accelerate digital infrastructure development and remove the planning and permitting bottlenecks that slow projects by months or years. In the US, interconnection queues now contain over a terawatt of large load applications, the majority of which are delayed not by lack of capital but by the complexity of the front-end development process. OpenAI's Project Constellation, a planned $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure across the United States, is one signal of the scale of capacity that needs to be brought online.
Build has delivered more than 100 projects across 15 countries, working with the UK government on AI infrastructure planning, hyperscalers and institutional real estate firms. Tishman Speyer, one of the world's largest real estate investment and management firms with a significant presence in London's Victoria district, is among the companies working with Build to accelerate its development pipeline. Build's investors include the CFO of OpenAI, one of the world's largest consumers of data centre capacity, and the CTO of Blackstone, one of the world's largest owners of data centre real estate.
Build was co-founded by James Stirrat-Ellis, a British architect who previously worked at Heatherwick Studio, the London-based design practice led by Thomas Heatherwick, known for projects including London's redeveloped Olympia, Coal Drops Yard in King's Cross, the New Routemaster bus, the London 2012 Olympic Cauldron, and the Google headquarters at King's Cross. Stirrat-Ellis worked on major global projects at the studio, including Singapore's Changi Airport Terminal 5, before co-founding Build with Ben McClusky, who specialised in multi-agent AI systems and reinforcement learning research. The two moved to New York to build the company together.
AI infrastructure is essential to economic growth, but we cannot keep dropping it into communities the way we have been. Deployment is only accelerating, and the old routes will not work. The UK needs agile policy on energy and planning to avoid both community opposition and the collapse of investment. Data centres can actually support new grid development and boost grid resilience in ways that will benefit the whole economy. The tools we have to make this happen are better AI to compress timelines and better design to bring communities with us. Those two things together are how this gets built.
Build represents a new generation of AI companies focused on delivering actual work rather than improving software workflows. James and Ben have combined deep technical capability with real operational understanding of how critical infrastructure gets built. The infrastructure challenge is global and the solution has to be too.
