• Born in Sydney, Built for the World: Founded in 2010 by Dr. Benjamin Coorey, Archistar began as an e-learning platform and evolved into a global AI design and property intelligence company.
• Innovation at Its Core: From its Sydney headquarters, Archistar’s tech experts develop cutting-edge generative design, site analysis, and zoning and building code compliance pre-check tools.
• A Culture of Purpose and Collaboration: The Archistar Sydney team blends purpose-driven work and a strong sense of community—complete with weekly coffee club meetups and cross-continental collaboration.

It all started in Sydney, Australia. Back in 2010, CEO Dr. Benjamin Coorey founded Archistar. He envisioned a world where generative design and AI would help architects, engineers, contractors, developers, homeowners, operators, and cities build better and faster.

Dr. Coorey started Archistar Academy, an e-learning platform used at universities and firms to teach generative design to AECO (architecture, engineering, construction, and operations) students and design firms.

Since then, he and a group of tech experts created the Archistar Property Platform to help developers, investors, architects, and real-estate agents in Australia quickly identify sites and understand property potential. The platform combines 200-plus datasets that include information about zoning, planning, market trends, and environmental risks.

More recently, Archistar expanded in the US and Canada with its eCheck platform, which helps governments automate complex zoning and building code compliance checks to speed up project approvals for housing and commercial building projects.

While there are offices in Vancouver in Canada and Los Angeles in the US—and remote employees around the world—the heartbeat of Archistar began in Sydney. Fifty people work in the Sydney office in the central business district, just an eight-minute drive from the Sydney Opera House.

Some Archistar employees have been with the company for as long as 10 years, and others joined just last week. One thing they all have in common is a sense of purpose. Archistar aims to mitigate the housing crisis and build better cities by drastically speeding up the process of designing and building homes and commercial spaces. It starts with generative design for early design concepts. Later on, there’s AI technology to assist with building permit approvals.

In challenging times, purpose and fulfillment matter more than ever. That’s what Gita Coorey, Talent Acquisition and Development Lead (and Dr. Benjamin Coorey’s wife) has seen with candidates and recent hires at Archistar.

“The ones who have made it through the hiring process, they’re always like, ‘I’m at a point in my life where the next thing I want to do, I just really want it to be meaningful,’” she says. “We want people to be passionate about our mission and have the drive and energy to pursue it.”

It doesn’t hurt having a CEO with a tech-for-good mindset who wants to bring people along for the ride and encourage their career development. “He’s all about mentoring people, growing his staff, letting them do what they’re passionate about, and giving them opportunities and exposure,” Coorey says.

Dr. Coorey has four architecture degrees and a deep academic background, including a PhD in Architecture, specializing in generative parametric performance design systems. His vision easily pulls people into his orbit, which his wife has witnessed throughout her recruiting process.

“Some of the recent recruits I’ve had have been watching what Ben’s been doing for over  eight years,” Coorey says.

As the recruiting and onboarding lead for Archistar, Coorey says one key goal is to bring on board employees who are like-minded and yet have diverse backgrounds and ideas to complement the existing team and drive the company’s vision and mission forward.

The culture of the Sydney team has gelled well because it’s been brewing for a while. One unique driver of the Sydney team’s bonding is its “coffee club,” where employees visit different cafes around the city every week. There’s even a coffee club Slack channel purely dedicated to pursuing the perfect coffee.

On Wednesdays, when most of the Sydney team is in the office, employees have lunch together, play ping-pong (aka table tennis), or hang out at one of the outdoor barbecues.

The 28-story office building at 388 George Street was refurbished by architecture firm FJMT and completed in 2020. One section of the office is the tech hub, where the technicians, software engineers, and computational designers sit, code, and problem-solve together on platform implementation. The other is for marketing, sales, finance, and meeting spaces.

While the tech team hubs in Los Angeles and Vancouver are humming along with their AI-driven plan checks of design plans, their collaborations with the Sydney tech team shows how well Archistar works across continents.

One benefit is how it’s making Archistar’s AI platforms smarter. “Because the Vancouver and LA tech teams are receiving the data and eCheck pre-check reports, they’re the best ones to give us feedback on how we can make the process more efficient,” Coorey says.

And therefore, Archistar keeps evolving. Dr. Coorey and his team have been developing design and compliance solutions for 10 years, so Archistar is not exactly a start-up. That said, the fruits of their labor are really kicking into high gear now.

“The OGs who have been around with us through the journey got to see it reach to this point, and I still feel like it’s in its infancy,” Coorey says. “The technology is always improving, it keeps getting better, smarter, and faster. We’ve still got so many more things in the catalog and pipeline.”