Buildcheck, an AI-powered construction design review platform, raised $5.9 million in seed funding to power its process that can perform hundreds of checks to spot errors, omissions and project coordination issues. The platform’s large language model analyzes construction drawings from a project’s main disciplines: architectural, structural, civil, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing.
The meeting was led by Uncork Capital with participation from Peterson Ventures and Xfund, along with strategic angel investments from founders and senior executives from OpenAI, Opendoor, CBRE, Zillow and others. Buildcheck announced the funding round on December 9. Existing clients include AvalonBay Communities and Novo Construction,
“Every missed drawing issue becomes a surprise expense on site,” said Joe Kirchofer, Avalon Bay Communities’ senior vice president for Northern California. “Traditionally, we performed manual drawing reviews on our major projects, but we were looking for a more efficient method. Buildcheck helps us reduce risk and make better use of our time and capital.”
The round is confirmation that the platform’s approach to document and plan review can help contractors, said Buildcheck CEO and co-founder Alexander Michalatos.
“Documents are the language of business, and this has been our approach for two years. I think investors recognize that, and it’s a vote of confidence, because construction technology is no longer a niche,” he noted. “These are general investors. They’ve seen tons of different industries. They see where the value is and they see the opportunity for displacement in vertical industries and legacy industries.”
Previously, Michalatos was a consultant for contractor EllisDon and started Buiidcheck with co-founders Andrei Molchynsky and Alex Gureev, helping to apply AI and machine learning to detect errors in CAD drawings and BIM models still in the design phase through preconstruction.
“We really focused on this use case, [with] maybe some of the other people in our space are after more text-based documents. We are very focused from the beginning on the drawings [and] understand what they’re saying,” says Moylchynsky. Understanding the text is just one piece, it’s very difficult. You had to really work on the models. [and] we had to think of new approaches.”
He adds that Buildcheck “filed a few patents along the way, and we established some partnerships with leading AI labs to help us think outside the box and really innovate.”
The company’s AI models were built through collaborations with leading research institutions, including Canada’s Quebec-based MILA and Alberta-based AMII, as well as expert advisors from OpenAI, ServiceNow and the University of Oxford.
Molychynski and Michalatos said they will use the investment to further refine their document-based design review tools and workflow to improve usability for contractors and developers.
“Construction is a $12 trillion market where design errors generate more than $200 billion in waste each year,” says Amy Saper, partner at investor Uncork Capital. “Buildcheck combines deep domain expertise with a computer vision platform that catches problems in drawings before they become costly problems in the field.”
