Launch HN: Bild AI (YC W25) – Understands Construction Blueprints Using AI

Congratulations on the launch. This is really cool, and useful.

Coincidentally, yesterday I had a client meeting and they ask for exactly that. I'm working as lead developer for https://howie.systems and we are building a co-pilot (knowledge platform) for the AEC industry.

Would love to have a talk. Your product could save us lot's of work!

Awesome! This is a huge opportunity to help a lot of people (clients, subcontractors and builders). A lot of money and time is wasted by the current inefficiencies. We gave takeoff construction plan parsing a go in 2022-2023 but couldn’t get the AI part to work well enough (and still haven’t been able to even with the latest ViT/ CLIP models). There was a lot of interest though!

- You’re right, data is very hard to come by. I’m curious, how do you plan to get around this? Outsourcing human labeling? We found it to be a very difficult task.

- The subcontractors and local construction companies we talked to were overwhelming excited about the idea.

- It’s entire people’s jobs to get this done and done correctly. They sit on site holding the pdfs in their hands, manually counting and calculating. You bet a lot of mistakes occur. They would absolutely love to have a digital assistant for this.

- Some of them (especially managers and owners) are quite technical and are using software such as BlueBeam and other CAD software to make these calculations. It’s quite manual currently, but gives great insight into a better solution. This led us to having the user manually select the symbol they wanted counted (which ML struggled to get right). Just getting the part counts (and highlighting them in the pdf) was a huge help!

- Impressive you got square footage calculations correct! In our experience, there was way too much variation between architects (and multistep dimension labeling) which made it hard (even for humans) to get right. How has your model generalized OOD thus far?

- Are you planning to integrate voice? Many of the subcontractors we worked with are very low tech. They usually talk with their clients in person, on the phone, or maybe text. But they don’t use email or their smart phones for much.

I will be following your work! I have friends who would love to use this once it passes the human threshold.

I feel like you must've put this somewhere, but where are you getting the cost information from? If I upload a blueprint and you tell me I need "x 2x4's at a cost of $y each totaling $z" for my project where is the y coming from? Can I tell you a specific supplier and then you'll "scrape" the cost data? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're doing here.

I'm asking because even though I am (mostly) technically illiterate I have asked both ChatGPT and Claude to help me build a scraper for construction material costs, from the suppliers we use, that can be updated in realtime or at least monthly. Haven't done anything with those instructions yet, but I would love nothing more than to use a tool that we could feed a blueprint into and then would tell me, with "laser-focus accuracy" <smile> how many x's the project would need and the costs. Even better yet if it could compare costs from suppliers and guide us to the lowest-cost supplier.

Edit: oh, while you're thinking of replying, how high fidelity do the blueprints need to be? Again, I'm sure you specify somewhere, but too lazy to find it. How far along the spectrum from "drawn on a napkin" to "fully standardized" do you accept?

I love this, it seems like 90% of the YC AI startups are geared towards selling to devs. There's so much value to be had finding where AI is relevant in the broader parts of the economy, especially something like construction.

Curious why you're going off of blueprints instead of BIM?

The benefit of estimating quantities and cost cycles in with pre-con and business development, the artifacts during the pre-con design phase tend to be different than the takeoff artifacts which are often transformed through BIM.

Did you learn something to the contrary? Or are you purposely targeting smaller firms and projects that don't use Bim and maybe won't for a long time?

Who is your market? In my area takeoffs are done by lumber yards, it's just a service they provide in order to win the business. So you are going to be selling B2B into a market that is very slow and resistant to change. I imagine many are using some software for their process but I've never seen it.

On the other side, architects are using Revit more and more and takeoffs like square footage of flooring are accurate and take no time at all. That's another industry slow to change and that used to take more effort so many architects aren't providing that information to their clients, but technically there's nothing preventing it. There's a bit more hand waving when it comes to calculating number of studs etc, but that is pretty straightforward as well.

Source: I'm funemployed as a drafter for a local architect after 25 years in software.

It’s interesting space to build a solution. The need for quantity take offs of a 2D PDF drawing that is most likely built in BIM software is mostly driven by contract structure.

If owners/developers understood this they could create contract structures that incentivize more fluid data collaboration aka the quantity take offs automatically generate as you are designing.

Pragmatically though in the current AEC landscape there is still a need for 2D QTO, nice work

Seems like an interesting application of AI. Going to be obvious to many, in hindsight. Having run a business in the trades, I used to receive 5-10 emails a day from companies offering estimation services. Clearly there is a need in the market.

It looks like your launch is opening this up to the general public - why not niche down to GCs? Maybe the launch is focused on simply gathering more blueprint data to feed your models?

Very excited for the day that you reverse the process and can generate blueprints and changes on demand.

Correction: A single estimating mistake can lead to MILLIONS in losses, the bankruptcy of the contractor, and years of litigation... lol!

Estimators miss things ALL THE TIME. It's the subject of seemingly endless in-house arguments between PMs and Estimators:)

I love the Blueprint Understanding.

One thing I've been thinking about is if you could use a model like this as the first pass for permitters (Like a GitHub Actions CI/CD) who review blueprints.

Many developers use the regulatory side of various engineering approval processes as a quality control check which costs money and time for the regulator who is tasked with enforcing a standard.

It would also be good to speed up the workflow for developers saying hey, this thing looks weird did you really mean to do this?

And then further on, you could add a way to check it for constructability. My framer friends often get annoyed at whatever engineer because the way the structure is designed is materially inefficient or hard to construct.

Then you can bid out the materials buying too. This could save homeowners tons of money rather than let a GC manage it.

Congrats on the launch! What kind of computer vision models do you use under the hood?

Interesting idea. Can i know how accurate or precise is your outcome. From a tech perspective, can you take more about how it works if you can?

Congratulations to the launch! Funny how two separate companies launch a product in the same space within a short period of time. AI-BOB, https://www.aibob.io/, got a lot of attention during TechArenan in Stockholm last week.

Oh hey welcome to the space. I'm the founder of https://www.sketchdeck.ai/. We started working on the same problem a couple of years ago. Took us longer than I would like to admit.

What's crazy about this is that the AI revolution is going nuts. We've started with Steel and customers who would traditionally bid on paper are now jumping straight to AI takeoffs. The impact is real.

One customer recently told us that he was able to bid on $200M more than he would have been able to otherwise: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7300899.... That's a couple of million in revenue that they would have worked away from because of capacity constraints.