Acelab’s new Materials Hub platform leverages artificial intelligence to revolutionize how architects and designers discover and specify building materials. Launched in early March 2025 with backing from $13 million in funding, the platform addresses longstanding challenges in architectural material selection by combining AI-powered search capabilities with a firm’s institutional knowledge. This innovation represents a significant advancement in architectural technology, potentially transforming how the industry approaches material specification while promoting sustainability in the built environment.
The big picture: Materials Hub contains an extensive database of over 10,000 building materials from more than 1,000 manufacturers, with 50,000 specific products across 25 categories including windows, doors, cladding, roofing, and insulation.
- The platform incorporates more than 900 product certifications, allowing architects to make informed decisions about sustainability and compliance.
- Materials Hub digitizes firms’ existing materials libraries, whether they’re stored in spreadsheets or as physical samples, preserving valuable institutional knowledge.
What they’re saying: Former Revit CEO Dave Lemont, now Acelab’s executive chairman, emphasized the platform’s transformative potential for sustainable architecture.
- “The world of architecture is at a critical juncture where material choices have never been more important,” Lemont stated, highlighting the platform’s ability to “change the world of material selection.”
- Lena Reiff from Ross Barney Architects noted the platform’s value for meeting open specification requirements: “We have to have at least three products that can all do relatively the same thing… we started using it for that, and we were able to find multiple materials that had similarities.”
How it works: Materials Hub employs conversational AI that understands architectural terminology, allowing users to make natural language queries about specific material requirements.
- Architects can ask questions like “show me slip-resistant tiles for freeze-thaw conditions” and receive precise, relevant answers based on the comprehensive materials database.
- The platform can be customized to work with architects’ specific product libraries and use cases, making it adaptable to different firms’ workflows.
Why this matters: Architecture firms often lose valuable material research when projects are completed, limiting their ability to leverage past knowledge for future designs.
- Steven Johns of KieranTimberlake pointed out this common challenge: “A lot of the research is stuck either on a project, in an email somewhere or in a PowerPoint presentation to a client. That information tends to get forgotten about as the project fades into the history books.”
- Materials Hub addresses this issue by creating a persistent, searchable repository of material knowledge that grows with each project.
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