The architecture game has always been about aesthetics, clean lines, curated light, flawless renders. But behind every perfect facade sits a mess of emissions. Concrete’s still heavy with carbon, glass still leaks heat, and even the “green” buildings quietly burn through resources. That’s the ugly math no one wanted to touch, until C.Scale came along. Born in 2024 as a public benefit corp out of San Francisco, C.Scale spun out of EHDD after 4 yrs of incubation, when CEO & Co-Founder Jack Rusk and Co-Founder Brad Jacobson, FAIA, decided the carbon story deserved its own software. Their idea started inside EHDD as EPIC (Early Phase Integrated Carbon), a prototype turned powerhouse that’s now the backbone of C.Scale’s mission: give designers carbon truth in real time.
Today, that mission just got a $2M boost. C.Scale closed its pre-seed round, co-led by Active Impact Investments & Wireframe Ventures, 2 early-stage players betting on profit with a purpose. Jack Rusk, with dual Yale degrees in architecture & industrial ecology, is the kind of polymath who speaks both design and data. Brad Jacobson, FAIA, has 22 yrs of net-zero projects behind him, from campuses to the AIA HQ renovation that redefined sustainable practice. Together, they built a platform that lets architects estimate, analyze, and cut carbon before the first beam hits steel.
Six inputs. Five minutes. That’s all it takes for C.Scale’s AI to predict a project’s full-life carbon footprint. It’s LCA without the spreadsheet suffering, machine learning doing what it does best: speed, precision, clarity. In the past 6 months, users have modeled 1,200+ projects, over 120M sq ft of real estate. From VMDO & Mahlum to DIALOG & LPA, firms are using C.Scale on 100% of their projects. Autodesk & Schneider Electric have already integrated it, and Stanford, Yale, Howard & UW are training the next wave of designers with it.
The platform’s even featured in the COP30 Catalogue of Solutions, recognized globally for accelerating near-zero buildings by 2030. That’s not hype; that’s traction. This $2M round fuels what’s next: scaling AI/ ML capabilities, building direct links between designers & manufacturers, and making LEED v5 compliance basically plug-and-play. The $1T building materials market is fractured, C.Scale plans to stitch it together with data as the thread.
