The problem we're tackling is the sheer manual effort that goes into generating material quantities and cost estimates from blueprints today. Contractors and suppliers spend countless hours doing takeoffs by drawing on blueprints by hand - it's tedious, error-prone, and costs the global industry $30B a year. A single mistake can lead to thousands in losses on a project.
My co-founder Puneet experienced this firsthand as he was building hundreds of houses in Canada. Meanwhile, my background is in applied ML - I started at Google at 19, then Waymo where I built perception models for self-driving cars. Puneet and I met at Hack for Social Impact where we built our first _very_ narrow-scoped prototype.
Since then we’ve expanded our scope slowly, with a laser-focus on accuracy. Our approach is to use a suite of specialized machine learning models for specific blueprint comprehension tasks, rather than a single end-to-end model. For example, we've developed computer vision models that are highly accurate at detecting and measuring floor areas, or identifying and counting framing elements like studs and doors. By composing these expert sub-models, we can achieve high accuracy on the overall takeoff.
This is somewhat analogous to the approach we took at Waymo for self-driving perception - having an array of dedicated models for tasks like lane detection, traffic light classification etc. It's a very different paradigm than the big-data end-to-end models like what Tesla uses - unfortunately we just don’t have enough data yet.
We're working with some early customers like flooring suppliers to help automate their estimating workflows. But we see a huge opportunity to expand this "AI that understands blueprints" approach across all trades.
Would love to get the HN community's thoughts and feedback! Construction is an industry I think is really ripe for applying cutting-edge ML techniques. If you have experience in this domain as a builder, architect, estimator, supplier etc. I'd love to hear about your workflow and pain points.
Also if you're a researcher or engineer excited about applying state-of-the-art techniques to real-world problems in underserved industries, definitely reach out!
We’re currently live with customers but are only able to serve a subset of trades accurately right now. Head to https://www.bild.ai/upload if you want to try uploading a blueprint and we can talk about your use-case. I truly believe we can solve blueprint understanding with AI, and there seem to be a huge number of applications. I'll be here all day to chat and answer questions!
