Acelab was founded by a team of architects and specification writers who personally experienced the challenges of material selection and specification in the architecture industry. They recognized a critical gap in the building technology ecosystem: while the industry had mastered tools for design documentation (like Revit), there was no central platform for one of the most crucial aspects of building creation—material selection and specification.
The founders were frustrated by the fragmented nature of material knowledge in architectural practices. They saw how valuable expertise was scattered across countless drives, buried in outdated PDFs, and locked in the minds of senior team members. They understood the inefficiency of architects spending excessive time searching through manufacturer websites, downloading scattered technical documents, and manually building spreadsheets for comparisons.
They founded Acelab with a core belief that materials are fundamental to transforming inspired designs into exceptional buildings. They recognized that material choices shape aesthetics, performance, sustainability, and ultimately, the human experience of built spaces. Yet architects faced overwhelming challenges in navigating hundreds of thousands of products while trying to capture and maintain their firm's collective material expertise.
The urgency for a material decision-making platform became even more apparent as global supply chain disruptions made traditional specification practices unreliable, rising interest rates broke project budgets forcing rapid material substitutions, and architects faced mounting pressure to address climate change through their material choices.
By creating the Material Hub platform, Acelab's founders aimed to develop a shared language for materials that would allow all stakeholders to collaborate effectively on material decisions from the earliest stages of design through construction. Their vision was to transform how the building industry makes material decisions, elevating not just individual buildings but the entire built environment through better-informed material choices.