Matt Nickel
A Columbia grad who was one of Google’s youngest engineers and a serial entrepreneur who built hundreds of homes starting at age 16 have their sights set on disrupting the construction industry with AI.
Roop Pal and Puneet Sukhija launched construction startup Bild AI in February and on Xday announced a $3.1 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Mission Street Capital, Ryan Sutton-Gee, and Ooshma Garg.
Bild uses AI to read blueprints and estimate the materials and costs associated with a project. This is currently a timely and error-prone process done by hand, Pal said.
The company, which consists of just Pal and Sukhija, will use its seed to hire engineers aggressively in order to expand its technology, Pal told BI.
The duo came up with the idea for Bild at a Hack for Social Impact event in San Francisco, and were accepted into Y Combinator within days of meeting.
“I was really mostly keen on the issue of affordable housing,” Pal, who also previously worked at Waymo, told BI. “There’s an opportunity to apply my knowledge in computer vision and AI to really make an impact.”
The startup’s early clients are material suppliers in the framing, flooring, and door businesses, predominantly for multifamily residences. The company makes money by charging subscription fees.
By cutting down on presconstruction costs, Pal said Bild could also spell savings for renters. “If you have elastic housing markets,” he said, “this cost passes through and people save on rent.”
Material analysis is just the first layer of Bild’s vision, as it incorporates new sub-trades — such as windows and roofing — one by one.
As its blueprint-reading technology becomes more sophisticated, it will ultimately be used in the permitting process, Pal said, to catch compliance issues and cut down on the costly and bureaucratic back-and-forth for residential and non-residential projects alike.
“If you reduce 1% of the cost of a hospital, that’s another hospital that we have budget to build,” he said. “It can really make a big difference broadly.”
In addition to Bild, AI is also infiltrating other aspects of the construction industry, with firms like Shawmut and Suffolk relying on the technology to shore up worker safety.
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