Buildcheck, an artificial intelligence-powered construction design review platform, raised $5.9 million in seed funding to scale its process, which performs hundreds of checks to detect project errors, omissions and coordination issues. The platform’s large language model analyzes construction drawings across major project disciplines—architectural, structural, civil, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing.
The round was led by Uncork Capital, with participation from Peterson Ventures and Xfund, and strategic angel investments from founders and senior executives at OpenAI, Opendoor, CBRE, Zillow and others. Buildcheck announced the funding round on Dec. 9. Existing customers include AvalonBay Communities and Novo Construction.
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“Every missed issue in a drawing becomes a surprise expense on-site,” said Joe Kirchofer, Avalon Bay Communities ‘ senior vice president for Northern California. “We traditionally performed manual drawing reviews of our large 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, Buildcheck CEO and co-founder Alexander Michalatos said.
«Drawings are the language of the business, and that’s been our focus for two years. I think investors recognize this, and it’s a vote of confidence, because construction tech is not a niche thing anymore,» he noted. «These are generals investors;they’ve seen tons of different industries; they see where value is, and they see the opportunity of displacement in vertical industries and legacy industries.»
Michalatos was previously a mechanical and electrical manager at the contractor EllisDon and co-founded Buildcheck with Andrei Molchynsky and Alex Gureev, who helped apply AI and machine learning to detect errors in 2D CAD drawings during the design and preconstruction phases.
«We’ve really been focused on this use case, [with] perhaps some of the other folks in our space more going after text-based documents. We’re really focused from the beginning on drawings [and] understand what they are saying,» says Molchynsky. «Understanding text is only one piece, it’s the drawings that are really hard. The models really needed to to be worked on [and] we needed to think of novel approaches.»
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He adds that Buildcheck «filed a few patents along the way and we entered into some partnerships with leading AI labs to help us think outside of the box and really innovate.»
The company’s AI models were built through collaborations with leading research institutions, including Canada’s MILA in Quebec and AMII in Alberta, as well as expert advisors from OpenAI, ServiceNow and Oxford University.
Molychynski and Michalatos said they will use the investment to further improve their drawing-based design review tools and workflow to enhance their usability for contractors and developers.
«Construction is a $12-trillion market where design errors create more than $200 billion in waste each year,» says Amy Saper, a partner in investor Uncork Capital. «Buildcheck combines deep domain expertise with a computer vision platform that catches issues in drawings early, before they turn into costly problems in the field.»
