SAVANNAH, Ga. — Savannah is built on history and hospitality, which makes the collaboration between Lamarr.AI — a company named after a historic inventor and actress — and the city a match made for the big screen.
Some of Savannah’s many old buildings are expensive to heat and cool, especially in Georgia’s humid summers. They develop leaks. They need routine maintenance. But how does a building owner know where to begin with renovations or repairs? Enter Lamarr.AI, one of the first companies supported by the Partnership for Innovation’s (PIN) new Community Investment program.
“The Community Investment program is matching up faculty-led, faculty-spinoff startup companies that have technology that could be relevant to a community, a government, or to the civic space,” said Katie O’Connor, PIN’s community investment manager. “The company’s product is something that can help a community in a smart cities kind of way.”
Lamarr.AI fits the bill to a T. Its technology and the company grew out of research at Georgia Tech. Lamarr.AI’s technology uses drones, imaging, and artificial intelligence (AI) to assess a building’s envelope and determine the best ways to make these structures more energy efficient.
“The technology is like giving a building an MRI using drones, infrared and regular images, and our own AI,” said Tarek Rakha, Lamarr.AI’s co-founder and CEO. The drones, he explained, detect missing insulation, water intrusion, air escaping, and physical damage. AI and machine learning translate that information into 3-D models that map the defects.
Award-Winning Thomasville Heights Project
Before becoming a company, Rakha and his partners worked on a previous PIN pilot project to assess the energy use of buildings in Atlanta’s Thomasville Heights neighborhood. That project won a national Smart20 Award in 2025 for reducing energy use and improving indoor comfort in one of the city’s underserved communities. It also launched the business.
“[That project] was a really great match for us, because we’re helping with understanding the building physics of existing buildings, specifically for homeowners and underserved communities,” Rakha said. “We learned of a real impact that we were able to do, which is making people more comfortable by identifying cost-effective solutions to mitigate both thermal comfort — comfort of people — as well as energy efficiency.”
He added it was one of the most rewarding academic moments of his life, recalling, “one of the community members said, ‘we actually felt the difference in our house after the cost-effective renovations were made.’”
Making Savannah Buildings More Efficient
The city of Savannah project calls for Lamarr.AI to assess five municipal-owned buildings – three fire stations, City Hall, and the Woodville Community Center.
“PIN contributing their credibility to the project and program, saying, ‘hey, we think this is going to add value,’ is a huge recommendation,” said Josh Corning, Savannah’s clean energy program manager. “They were able to support this program with some funding as well, which really goes a long way, especially for work that is an emerging technology.”
The project is well underway, Corning said, and the city is happy with the progress.
“It was a great opportunity for us representing the public sector, to collaborate with the private sector,” Corning said. “We want to continue to explore those partnerships, and this was an awesome team to start that with.”
The Lamarr.AI data provides important information that can help the city prioritize renovations and maintenance.
“Using advanced simulations, we’re able to give our customers return on investment (ROI) analyses,” Rakha said. “Typically, we work with building owners who have campuses or multiple buildings to help them understand how their building enclosures are causing them to bleed out massive amounts of money.” That financial pain point can come from energy loss, waste, water intrusion, and structural decay. Lamarr.AI’s technology shows how customers can surgically fix issues and increase the ROI to boost energy efficiency.”
Next Stop: Augusta Colleges
Lamarr.AI will continue its collaboration with PIN with a project in Augusta to examine buildings belonging to Augusta Technical and Paine colleges.
“Building enclosures are the first line of defense against issues of the climate as well as the safety of the people inside them,” Rakha explained. “When you have a vulnerable building envelope, you are not just putting people at risk, you are also being very inefficient, wasteful, and are not prepared for what comes next with issues of sustainability and energy efficiency.”
But what does all of this have to do with an inventor and actress?
“We named the company Lamarr as a nod to the inventor and actress Hedy Lamarr,” Rakha said.
The Austrian-born Lamarr was a leading lady of Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and ’40s, and she was also an inventor.
She collaborated with composer George Antheil on an early frequency-hopping communication system during World War II — an idea that later contributed to the development of modern wireless technologies.
“She was not widely recognized for her scientific contributions until later in her life,” Rakha said. “The name reflects a broader recognition of innovators whose work was ahead of its time or underappreciated, including women like Hedy Lamarr.”