# Bild AI

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/bild-ai/ · added 2026-11-08 · updated 2026-11-08

**In short.** Bild AI (AI takeoffs for Division 8 (doors, frames and hardware): reads blueprints and specifications, builds door and hardware schedules, and exports the bid to the distributor's quoting system, United States): Sold to Division 8 distributors and estimators, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 2 co-founders at the February 2025 launch; 9 people on the Y Combinator company page in November 2026, after a seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Launched February 2025; still running.

AI takeoffs for Division 8 (doors, frames and hardware): reads blueprints and specifications, builds door and hardware schedules, and exports the bid to the distributor's quoting system · United States · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Operations, logistics and trades

- Outcome: Sold to Division 8 distributors and estimators, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: February 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 21
- Team: 2 co-founders at the February 2025 launch; 9 people on the Y Combinator company page in November 2026, after a seed round led by Khosla Ventures
- Outside funding: Seed round led by Khosla Ventures, announced July 2025 (US$3.1M as stated by Signalbase and Dev Curation; the company's own post gives no amount)
- Main factor: Domain focus
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 2
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Construction

Links:

- Visit bild.ai: https://www.bild.ai/

**The product.** Web software for the estimators of door, frame and hardware distributors. The customer uploads the plans and specifications of a building; Bild AI finds every door opening, reads the door schedule and the hardware sets, splits the sets by door size, checks the plan, the schedule and the specification against each other, compares drawing versions, and exports the result in the import format of the distributor's quoting system. An assistant called Bildy changes hundreds of openings at once from a sentence in plain English.

**Why it worked.** In February 2025 the two founders sold blueprint reading for many trades, with flooring suppliers as the first clients. By July 2025 they had trained a model for one trade, Division 8, where one building can have hundreds of doors, each with its own hardware set, and where the estimator otherwise types every line by hand into the quoting system.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Bild AI is a San Francisco company that sells takeoffs, the count and measurement of every material item in a building's drawings, which a supplier needs before it can price a bid. It now works only on Division 8, the section of the standard construction specification format that covers openings: doors, frames and door hardware. It reads the door schedule (the table in the drawings that lists every door with its size, material and fire rating) and the hardware sets (the lists of hinges, locks, closers and other parts that belong to each type of door), and exports them to the distributor's quoting system.

Roop Pal, who built computer vision models at Google and Waymo, and Puneet Sukhija, who had built houses in Canada, started it in 2024 and launched it in February 2025 in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch. In their Launch HN post they wrote that they were "live with customers". In July 2025 the company announced a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and a model trained only for Division 8; Signalbase reported the round as US$3.1M. In November 2026 the Y Combinator page lists 9 people, and the home page shows the logos of 18 door and hardware distributors under "Trusted by".

No revenue figure, price or customer count was found, so this story is grade E: the headline is a status, that the company sells to Division 8 distributors, as the company itself states. The bid increases that the company reports for its clients are customer outcomes, not revenue.

## Pricing

Bild AI prices: none are published (read 8 November 2026, grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Division 8 takeoffs | not published | not published | by upload form and contact; no price on the site |

On 8 November 2026 bild.ai/pricing answers 404 and the site has no price on any page that was read. Buyers start with "Upload your plans", a form that says "We'll respond frighteningly fast", or the address contact@bild.ai. PropTechBuzz wrote on 3 July 2025 that "The startup operates on a subscription-based revenue model"; no source gives a price, a plan name or a billing period.

## How much revenue does Bild AI make? The numbers, graded

A two-founder San Francisco company that sells AI takeoffs to door and hardware distributors, with a seed round, 9 people and no published prices or revenue

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status, November 2026 | sold to Division 8 distributors and estimators, as the company states | C | Home page: "Trusted by Division 8 distributors & estimators nationwide" and "Our client network across North America". Y Combinator page: "clients have bid 50% more with smaller estimating teams." PropTechBuzz (3 July 2025): "Bild’s early customers include suppliers in the framing, flooring, and door industries" and "The startup operates on a subscription-based revenue model." No source states a price, a contract or a named paying customer. | [1, 2, 11] |
| Customers named by the company | 18 distributor logos, among them ARJ Architectural, Schiller Hardware, Willis Klein Commercial and NY Fireproof Door | C | Logo strip on the home page under "Trusted by Division 8 distributors & estimators nationwide". No statement by any of these companies was found. | [1] |
| Founders | Roop Pal and Puneet Sukhija | C | Y Combinator page and the Launch HN post: "We're Roop and Puneet, the founders of Bild AI". The company blog says they met at Hack for Social Impact. | [2, 4, 5] |
| Company start | 2024 | C | Y Combinator page: year founded 2024. Dev Curation (15 October 2025) writes "Founded Feb 2025", which is the month of the public launch. The Internet Archive copy of bild.ai from 20 December 2024 is a page that offers the domain for sale, so no earlier product ran on this domain. | [2, 8, 9] |
| Launch | February 2025 | C | Y Combinator Launch post dated 11 February 2025; the company blog (2 July 2025): "Since launching in February, our models have analyzed blueprints across 6 countries". | [3, 5] |
| Team | 2 founders at launch; 9 people in November 2026 | C | The Launch HN post is written by the two founders. The Y Combinator page gives a team size of 9 (read 8 November 2026). Signalbase listed "2-10 employees" on 3 July 2025. | [4, 2, 7] |
| Funding | seed round led by Khosla Ventures, with Mission Street Capital, Ryan Sutton-Gee and Ooshma Garg | C | Company blog, 2 July 2025, with no amount. Signalbase (3 July 2025) and Dev Curation (15 October 2025) give US$3.1M. | [5, 7, 8] |
| Prices | not published | C | bild.ai/pricing answers 404; see the pricing table. | [1] |
| First archived product page | 21 February 2025: "Understand blueprints with AI" (the page description) | B | Internet Archive copy: material cost estimation, code compliance checks for permits and blueprint accuracy for any project, with "Featured on Y Combinator". Not yet aimed at Division 8. | [9] |
| What the company says clients gained | 10x more projects (February 2025); 50% more bids (November 2026); 40-60% more bids per estimator (November 2026) | C | Y Combinator Launch post: "Our first clients are using Bild AI to bid on 10x more projects". Home page: "40-60% more bids per estimator", with the source given only as an unnamed Division 8 distributor. These are customer outcomes, not Bild AI's revenue. | [3, 2, 1] |
| Quoting systems it exports to | Comsense, PortalPro, AVAware, TOAD, eMullion, SFH; the Y Combinator page also names ProTech | C | Home page section "Push straight into your quoting system" and the Y Combinator description. | [1, 2] |
| AI models | its own computer vision models, chained with vision-language models; provider not named | C | Launch post: "applies computer vision models and large language models". Launch HN reply by Roop Pal: "You can chain those CV models with VLMs". No page names a model provider. | [3, 4] |
| Time from launch to the November 2026 status | 21 months | calc | Calculated: February 2025 to November 2026. | [3, 1] |

How to read this table: a grade C value is the company's own statement (its site, its Y Combinator pages, the founders' Launch HN post) or a news note about its announcement. A grade B value is an independent record: dated Internet Archive copies of its home page. An "X" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A.

## When did Bild AI launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a for-sale domain in December 2024 to a product for one construction trade in November 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **20 December 2024** (grade B [9]): bild.ai shows a page that offers the domain for sale.
- **11 February 2025** (grade C [3]): The Y Combinator Launch post says Bild AI reads blueprints for "flooring, doors, hardware and more" and that its first clients are flooring suppliers.
- **21 February 2025** (grade B [9]): The home page description reads "Understand blueprints with AI", and the page offers estimation, permit code checks and accuracy checks, with an upload form.
- **27 February 2025** (grade C [4]): The founders' Launch HN post gets 98 points: "We're currently live with customers but are only able to serve a subset of trades accurately right now."
- **2 to 3 July 2025** (grade C [5, 6, 7]): The company announces a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and introduces "Bild AI D8, a model built and trained specifically to serve the Division 8 industry"; Signalbase reports US$3.1M.
- **8 November 2026** (grade C [1, 2]): The site speaks only to Division 8 distributors and estimators, shows 18 distributor logos, and the Y Combinator page lists 9 people.

## Why did Bild AI work?

### One trade instead of all trades

In February 2025 the product read blueprints for flooring, framing, doors and permit checks. By July 2025 the founders had trained a model only for Division 8, and by November 2026 the home page sells nothing else. One trade has the same document types and symbols on every project, so a narrow model can be checked against a known answer.

### Many small models instead of one large model

In the Launch HN post Roop Pal wrote that they use "a suite of specialized machine learning models for specific blueprint comprehension tasks", such as detecting floor areas or counting doors, and compose them, as perception teams do for self-driving cars.

### Output in the format the customer already imports

The home page says the export is "Sized, split, and formatted to import" into the quoting systems that door distributors run, such as Comsense and AVAware, so the estimator does not type the lines again.

### Checks that an estimator would do by hand

The software compares each opening across the plan, the schedule and the specification, and lists added, removed and changed doors between drawing versions, which helps the estimator write a request for information (RFI), a formal question to the architect about a conflict in the drawings.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's site, its Y Combinator pages, the founders' Launch HN post and the page source of its website. They are grade C unless marked.

- Computer vision models for detection and measurement tasks on drawings, chained with vision-language models, for example to get the drawing scale right (Launch HN).
- A web application at app.bild.ai where customers upload plans, edit openings and export the takeoff, with an assistant called Bildy for bulk edits in plain English.
- Exports in the import formats of door-distributor quoting systems: Comsense, PortalPro, AVAware, TOAD, eMullion and SFH.
- The 2025 site and the blog were built with Framer; the current home page is served by Ploy and built with Astro; both load PostHog and Google's gtag script, and the 2025 site loaded a LiveChat widget (page source, grade B).
- No page names the language model provider or the cloud provider.

Sources: [4, 1, 2, 9, 6]

## Who tried this before Bild AI, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups promised to make building cheaper and faster with technology and failed. Two of them, Katerra and Veev, also had Khosla Ventures among their investors. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Katerra (2015 to 2022; funding US$2.6B; cause: Unit Economics)

- Promise: One company for the whole building process, from design and factory-made parts to construction.
- Why it died: It built factories and supply chains before it had enough customers, then bought other companies and went bankrupt.
- Record: 

### Veev (2008 to 2024; funding US$647M; cause: Unit Economics)

- Promise: Factory-made wall panels with built-in wiring and plumbing, so homes could be assembled faster and cheaper.
- Why it died: Its factory needed large and steady demand, and higher interest rates cut home demand while it still had high fixed costs.
- Record: 

### Social Construct (2017 to 2020; funding US$17M; cause: Ran Out of Cash)

- Promise: Faster and cheaper housing through a technology-driven way of building.
- Why it died: It expected to scale faster than construction rules and the pandemic allowed, and ran out of money.
- Record: 

## What changed

The three predecessors tried to change the building itself: factories, panels or a new construction method. Katerra raised US$2.6B and Veev US$647M, as our database of failed startups records, and all three needed buildings to sell before the investment paid back.

Bild AI changes nothing on the building site. It reads the drawings that a distributor already receives for every bid, a task that computer vision and vision-language models can now do for one narrow trade. It sells to an existing step of an existing business, so a customer can see the result on the next bid. The open question, which no source answers, is how much distributors pay and whether they keep paying.

## Can one person copy Bild AI now?

**Verdict: Not as a solo project, and not without trade knowledge and training data.**

The founders combined computer vision experience from Google and Waymo with years of house building, joined Y Combinator and raised a seed round. A Division 8 takeoff needs models trained on real drawings, exports for several quoting systems, and estimators who trust the result. The method, one trade and one document type, can be copied in other trades by someone who knows that trade's drawings.

1. Pick one trade whose estimators count items on drawings by hand for every bid.
2. Train small models for each detection task (doors, tags, schedules) and check them against finished takeoffs from real customers.
3. Export in the exact import format of the quoting systems that trade already uses.
4. Add the checks an estimator does by hand: conflicts between plan, schedule and specification, and changes between drawing versions.

**What is still open.** Other construction trades with their own schedules (windows, plumbing fixtures, electrical devices, fire protection), and suppliers in countries with other drawing standards.

## What could go wrong for Bild AI?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure, price or customer count was found. The Y Combinator pages, the Launch HN post, the company blog and the funding notes give none, and no Bild AI profile is in the TrustMRR slug list. That the product is sold rests on the company's own words ("clients", "customers", "Our client network"), its logo strip and a PropTechBuzz news note of 3 July 2025 ("The startup operates on a subscription-based revenue model"); no named customer has confirmed it in a source that was read. The US$3.1M seed amount comes from Signalbase and Dev Curation; the company's own announcement gives no amount. The start year is 2024 on the Y Combinator page and February 2025 in Dev Curation. A reader could look for a customer case study that names the distributor, a price in a contract or a public tender, or a founder interview with figures.
- **Trust signals on the company's pages.** The 18 distributor logos under "Trusted by Division 8 distributors & estimators nationwide" carry no quote, date or link, and no statement by those companies was found. A section headed "Customer success story" shows a video titled "Bild AI — Division 8 Takeoffs Demo" and names no customer. The bid increase of 40% to 57% year on year is attributed to an unnamed "Division 8 distributor, $100M+ annual revenue" (the home page's words). The claimed gains changed over time: "10x more projects" in February 2025, "50% more" on the Y Combinator page and "40-60% more bids per estimator" on the home page in November 2026. The February 2025 home page showed "95% Model Accuracy" and "6 months Average Time Saved" without a method. The November 2026 home page also states "98+ sites in one year" under "Our client network across North America", with no list of the sites and no method.
- **Team size and funding.** Two founders launched the product in February 2025. The Y Combinator page lists 9 people in November 2026, after the seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Under the site's rule for funded teams of 6 to 10 that were started by 1 to 5 people, the story keeps the label "Small team".
- **Competition.** On this site Tyce reads all bid documents for general contractors and Blueprint Crusher parses bills of quantities, while Bild AI works for one trade, Division 8 distributors, and exports to their quoting systems.
- **Dependence on model providers.** The Launch post says Bild AI uses "computer vision models and large language models", and Roop Pal wrote on Launch HN that they chain their own computer vision models with vision-language models. No page names the provider of the language models. The detection models are the company's own, so a change at an outside provider would reach only part of the product, and no source says which part.

## Sources

1. Bild AI home page, read 8 November 2026 — https://www.bild.ai/ (grade C). Read in full, including the page source. Source for the Division 8 product, the logo strip, the ROI section, the quoting systems and the site tools. bild.ai/pricing and bild.ai/about answered 404 on the same day.
2. Y Combinator company page: Bild AI, read 8 November 2026 — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bild-ai (grade C). Read the company data embedded in the page. Source for the description, the founders, the year founded (2024), the team size (9), the batch (Winter 2025) and the Khosla Ventures backing.
3. Y Combinator Launch: Bild AI – Read and Understand Blueprints using AI, 11 February 2025 — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/MmV-bild-ai-read-and-understand-blueprints-using-ai (grade C). Read in full. Source for the first product scope, the first clients (flooring suppliers), the "10x more projects" claim and the computer vision and language models.
4. Launch HN: Bild AI (YC W25) – Understand Construction Blueprints Using AI, 27 February 2025 — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43196474 (grade C). Read the founders' post and Roop Pal's replies. Source for the founders, the specialized-model approach, the VLM chaining and "live with customers".
5. Bild AI blog: Time to Bild, 2 July 2025 — https://www.bild.ai/blog/time-to-bild (grade C). Read in full. Source for the seed round and its investors, the February launch, "6 countries", "more than half a dozen construction customers" and how the founders met.
6. Bild AI blog: AI for Division 8 (Doors, Windows), 2 July 2025 — https://www.bild.ai/blog/door-takeoffs (grade C). Read in full. Source for the Bild AI D8 model and the export to Comsense, Emullion and Avaware.
7. Signalbase, 3 July 2025: Blueprint for Success: Bild AI Raises $3.1M to Revolutionize Cost Estimation in Construction — https://www.trysignalbase.com/news/funding/blueprint-for-success-bild-ai-raises-31m-to-revolutionize-cost-estimation-in-construction (grade C). Read the free part in full. A funding note that quotes the company's announcement; source for the US$3.1M amount and "2-10 employees".
8. Dev Curation, 15 October 2025: Company Spotlight: Bild AI — https://devcuration.substack.com/p/company-spotlight-bild-ai (grade C). Read in full. A newsletter profile; source for the US$3.1M seed in July 2025 and its "Founded Feb 2025" line.
9. Internet Archive copies of bild.ai, 20 December 2024 and 21 February 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20250221213059/https://www.bild.ai/ (grade B). Read both copies in full, including the page source. The December 2024 copy is a domain-for-sale page; the February 2025 copy is the first Bild AI product page.
10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.
11. PropTechBuzz, 3 July 2025: Construction Startup Bild Secures $3.1 Million to Streamline Housing Development with AI — https://www.proptechbuzz.com/news/bild-construction-ai-funding (grade C). Read in full. A news note on the seed round. Source for "Bild’s early customers include suppliers in the framing, flooring, and door industries", "The startup operates on a subscription-based revenue model" and "Currently operated by just the two co-founders".

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Bild AI? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Bild AI).