goNEON Agentic Systems secures €160K to accelerate AI-powered infrastructure planning

Infrastructure planning has a speed problem, and it's not a new one. Engineers evaluating road, utility, or urban projects still lean on manual workflows and software that doesn't talk to itself, which means testing even a handful of design alternatives can eat up serious time before a project ever breaks ground. goNEON Agentic Systems, a spin-off from ETH, thinks it has a fix, and it just picked up €160,000 (CHF150,000) from Venture Kick to push that fix further.

The pitch is straightforward: an AI platform that generates infrastructure designs automatically, factoring in engineering requirements, local regulations, and the messy real-world constraints that usually slow things down. Instead of an engineer manually building and checking one scenario at a time, the platform spits out technically feasible options fast enough that teams can compare far more alternatives than they normally would. goNEON is careful to frame this as augmentation, not automation that pushes engineers out of the loop. The goal is to compress a process that takes weeks into something measured in minutes, while still holding the line on engineering standards and regulatory compliance.

Behind the company are CEO Raphael Eder and CTO Dr Lukas Ballo, a pairing that blends entrepreneurial chops, AI know-how, and urban planning background. That combination matters here, because infrastructure planning isn't a domain where you can just bolt a language model onto existing software and call it done. It requires understanding the regulatory and technical constraints that make a design actually buildable, not just plausible-looking.

Eder credited Venture Kick with helping the company move from research mode into something with actual customers, saying the program pushed goNEON to validate its market early and connected it with founders and investors. That's a fairly common story for early-stage spin-offs, but it underscores how much of the challenge isn't just building the technology, it's proving someone will pay for it.

With the fresh funding, goNEON says it will focus on pilot projects that show the strongest market potential, turn its most repeatable planning workflows into product modules that can scale, and use those pilots to validate the use cases underpinning its broader platform. In other words, this is still early, proof-of-concept territory rather than a finished product being rolled out at scale. But for a sector notorious for dragging its feet on modernization, even incremental automation of the design-alternative grind could be a meaningful shift.