Construction intelligence
Private alphaBuildIQ
A drawing set goes in. A priced bill of quantities comes out. The three weeks in between are the product.
Every bid in the industry waits on somebody counting.
Studs, fixtures, linear metres of conduit, square metres of slab, all measured by hand off a drawing set before a single number goes out of the door. Two to four weeks of the most expensive person in the business, under deadline, for a bid that may not be won. Then the architect issues a revision and a good part of it is done again.
An error costs nothing to make and a great deal to find. A missed run of ductwork on one sheet does not surface at tender. It surfaces as a variation order eight months into the build, when the margin it eats is already spent. This is where construction margin is won and lost, and it is still done with a highlighter.
The export strips the labels. We put them back.
A drawing set leaves the authoring tool as lines, arcs and text. The geometry survives the export intact. What does not survive is the layer that said which line is a wall and which is a pipe, and rebuilding that layer is the part everything else depends on. Quantities are then computed by a geometry engine rather than inferred, so the arithmetic is auditable line by line.
Rates come off live supplier feeds, so when steel moves the bill moves with it. Every run goes out beside a human estimator on a real bid package and the two are reconciled line by line. Where they disagree, the estimator is right until we can show otherwise.
Opened inside 21M Labs as file 001, and venture-built by Ezra Bridge once it held. Positioned as AI-assisted take-off validated by the contractor, not full automation, and not claimed as such.
Then it never lets go of the estimate.
The deeper problem arrives after the bid is won. The estimate that won the job is rarely the document the job is then run against. Costs land in a different system, in a different shape, and by the time anyone can compare committed spend against the original budget the money is gone. The margin is discovered, not managed.
So the estimate is locked as the budget. Purchase orders, supplier invoices, labour hours and variations all post against it, and budget, committed, actual and forecast stay on one page for the life of the project. That continuity, rather than the speed of the take-off, is what the product is actually for.