Seedcamp backs Spacemaker alumni's Solvera with $6.3M to build an AI-run engineering firm
The Oslo startup, founded in July 2026, says it signed $1 million in contracts in its first three months and is already running at full capacity.
Solvera, an Oslo-based company that bills itself as an engineering firm built around AI rather than a tool sold to engineers, has raised a $6.3 million pre-seed round led by Seedcamp.
The round drew a long list of co-investors: Construct Venture, the Inception Fund, Momentum, OBOS Ventures, PSV Tech, Sondo and The Nordic Web Ventures, alongside angels Anders Kvåle and Håvard Haukeland, both founders of Spacemaker.
The founding team comes out of that same stamping ground. CEO Arif Mirza spent almost ten years getting AI software adopted in the construction industry, starting at Spacemaker — which Autodesk bought for $240 million in 2020 — and then moving to Autodesk, where he led strategy and go-to-market efforts for Autodesk Forma, a product that now includes several features from Spacemaker. Co-founder and CTO Pål Rasmussen held a range of leadership positions at Spacemaker and Autodesk over the past ten years. The third co-founder, Thorvald Thorsnes, is chief commercial officer; before that he co-founded Enode, a Y Combinator-backed startup that links electric vehicles and other energy devices to apps and secured $15 million in Series A funding in November 2022.
Mirza told Tech Funding News he decided to start again because a persistent gap existed between what technology could do and how it was actually used. He pointed to a March 2026 Anthropic study into AI and jobs, which stated that real-world use of AI “still amounts to only a small portion of what is feasible.” Mirza claims that in architecture and engineering, “85% of the tasks could at least be carried out twice as quickly,” while adding that AI is employed in “less than 5%” of cases.
Solvera was founded in July 2026 and acts as the official engineering firm, taking full responsibility for project design. It oversees projects at every stage, from initial requirements through to producing designs ready for construction. Customers pay for the outcomes, not for software licences or consulting hours.
“That is the reason why we have decided not to create yet another tool for engineers which doesn’t make a difference to the way work gets done. Instead, we are building the engineering firm itself around AI,” Mirza said.
On traction, Solvera says it has signed contracts totalling $1 million within its first three months and is already running at full capacity.
That is the reason why we have decided not to create yet another tool for engineers which doesn’t make a difference to the way work gets done. Instead, we are building the engineering firm itself around AI.
About the Company
AI engineering firm founded by Spacemaker alumni.