Pre-Seed

Factorymaker: Vienna Startup Secures €1.1 Million for AI-Powered Factory Planning

co-written by newsrooms.ai19. February 2026, 12:50

Dr. Julia Reisinger und Maria Zahlbruckner von Factorymaker. © Factorymaker

Vienna-based startup Factorymaker has closed a pre-seed round of €1.1 million. The financing was led by Berlin-based VC 2bX and XISTA Science Ventures. The investment, closed in January 2026, is intended to accelerate development of the AI platform for industrial construction project planning. The cloud-based platform is already being used by Siemens Energy, Schaeffler, and Hilti.

Conventional factory planning consumes time and budget: a single production layout costs an average of €70,000 and requires 100 working days. Manual processes, fragmented tools, and isolated workflows lead to costly planning errors. European manufacturers are under pressure, and traditional methods often fail to keep pace.

100,000 Variants in Minutes Instead of Weeks

Factorymaker automates planning work that would otherwise take weeks using AI-powered design agents and a proprietary database of real projects. Where planners previously could work through two to three design variants, the platform evaluates and ranks 100,000 options in minutes. Each variant is assessed for cost, workflow efficiency, and environmental impact.

Customers report 82 percent less planning time, 21 percent lower construction costs, 36 percent reduced material transport, and significant CO₂ savings. The platform is used for both new builds and modifications to existing facilities.

In 2025, the Vienna startup was already recognized as Female Startup of the Year as part of the #glaubandich CHALLENGE award. Factorymaker emerged in 2020 from a research project by Dr. Julia Reisinger at TU Wien and was founded in 2024. Alongside co-founders Maria Zahlbruckner and Reisinger, Leonardo Lino serves as CTO.

Investors See Billion-Euro Market

Mark Harré, General Partner at 2bX, explains: “Industrial facility planning is a multi-billion-euro market that still runs largely on manual processes – for us, that signals a massive opportunity for disruption. Maria and Julia bring a rare combination of deep domain expertise and product vision; they are building the platform this industry has been waiting for.”

Dr. Annu Gmeiner, Principal at XISTA Science Ventures, adds: “Planning and replanning industrial buildings and production layouts is a manual, labor-intensive process where, according to various sources, 90 percent of project errors originate, leading to billions in annual rework costs.”

Co-founder Dr. Julia Reisinger emphasizes the timing: “We’re able to scale at a critical moment. European manufacturers face unprecedented pressure to build and adapt their facilities due to shifting pressures and demands. Traditional planning methods can’t keep up. That’s the bottleneck we’re solving.” Co-founder Maria Zahlbruckner adds: “The response from leading investment funds underscores the urgency of transforming industrial facility and production layout planning through automation. We were in the lucky position to choose the best partners for us.”