Sunil Dorairajan sold Pype to Autodesk in 2020. The entrepreneur had even more ideas about how an AI-powered platform could help in construction beyond preconstruction.
Wyre is an AI-powered document intelligence platform that scans drawings and specifications and turns them into structured scopes, risk insights and traceable references for contacts.
On September 10, Wyre announced $5 million in pre-seed and seed funding. The seed round was led by Ironspring Ventures, with participation from WND Ventures (the corporate venture arm of DPR Construction) and Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC). The round also included angel investments from construction tech figures such as Motif CEO Amar Hanspal (also former co-CEO of Autodesk), Rajesh Ram (co-founder and chief growth officer of Egnyte) and Joseph Khoury (VP of Preconstruction and co-founder of MCN Build).
“I spent a decade in pre-construction and operations before building software for this,” Dorairajan said. “The job hasn’t fundamentally changed. Some people read thousands of pages under a deadline and hope they don’t miss a thing. That’s not a personnel problem, it’s a technology problem.”
Dorairajan said Pype demonstrated that construction documents could be made machine-readable, “with Wyre, we’re going further: turning them into areas where teams can bid and risks they can act on before a project starts,” he said.
Wyre Scopes uses machine learning to analyze an entire set of documents, identify all scopes of work and deliver traceable scope packages that are refined by pre-construction teams. Wyre also offers Wyre Check, an AI-based service that checks the resulting shop documents and drawings for potential clashes. Dorairajan says the company has invested in developing models powerful enough to decipher and translate sets of document sheets into scopes.
“We have our own trained model data and labeled information from our subject matter experts who validated the information for all these domains,” said Dorairajan. “That’s where we’re building ours [intellectual property] layer”.
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Dorairajan said having subject matter experts early on will help separate Wyre from an increasingly competitive field of document review AI. Wyre is up against industry players like Procore’s DataGrid, Trunk Tools, and of course his former company Pype, now at Autodesk. Wyre is already being tested by about a dozen contractor customers in various stages of deployment.
“It’s not just a pre-construction tool – our operations team used it through scope writing and procurement, uncovering gaps and scope conflicts before they could impact the project. Whether you’re onboarding a new APM or managing concurrent purchases, it makes the whole team efficient,” said Rycon Construction Project Manager Dylan John.
Wyre also incorporated Varada Pyda as a core technology. Pyda was previously head of engineering at Pype and most recently led AI solutions at Autodesk Construction Solutions before rejoining Dorairajan at Wyre.
“[Preconstruction] it’s the phase where the most high-stakes decisions are made and the margins are set,” said Ty Findley, co-founder and general partner at Ironspring Ventures. “It’s a massive challenge that we see across our network of operators in the built world, and that’s exactly why we’re thrilled to lead this round and bring Sunil back.”
