Construction moves at a glacial pace for one simple reason. Estimators still spend 20 hours a week on spreadsheets. While AI has transformed finance, manufacturing, and logistics, construction and pre-construction remain extremely manual.
That changes now. San Francisco-based Attentive.ai just raised $30.5 million in Series B funding to bring AI-driven automation to an industry that desperately needs it. The round, led by Insight Partners with participation from Vertex Ventures, Tenacity Ventures, and InfoEdge Venture Fund, brings total funding to $48 million.
At the center of this shift is Beam AI, Attentive.ai’s takeoff automation platform. Takeoffs are the process of calculating material quantities from construction blueprints, critical work that determines project budgets and bid competitiveness. The problem is that this work is almost entirely manual. Estimators trace drawings, count components, and enter data into spreadsheets.
It’s repetitive, error-prone, and catastrophically slow. Beam AI eliminates this bottleneck by automating 100% of the takeoff process, saving contractors up to 90% of their time while maintaining ±1% accuracy compared to in-house estimators.
The results speak for themselves. Over 1,100 contractors and suppliers already use Beam AI. Rays Stairs Inc. doubled bid volume and scaled revenue from $900,000 to $2 million in two months. Bommarito Construction submitted 50 more bids in six months and increased revenue by $1 million. These aren’t edge cases, they’re proof that eliminating manual takeoffs unlocks real business growth.
Why Now?
Construction is one of the world’s largest industries, yet also one of the least digitized. As infrastructure projects accelerate across the U.S., pressure on preconstruction teams has intensified. Large-scale developments need faster bids. Data centers need rapid deployment. Industrial projects demand scale. Yet the underlying process hasn’t really evolved in decades.
Shiva Dhawan, Attentive.ai’s co-founder and CEO, saw this gap early. “We started by automating property measurements for landscaping,” he explained. “But the bigger realization came when we worked with construction customers and saw them spending days on takeoffs. We realized we were looking at an industry opportunity, not just a product opportunity.”
That insight became the foundation for Beam AI. Unlike competitors that require users to click, trace, and label drawings manually, Beam AI uploads site plans and generates bid-ready quantities within 24 to 72 hours with minimal human intervention.
The platform reads specifications, notes, and legends, interpreting details automatically. It handles multiple trades like HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, concrete, steel, civil utilities, and more.
What makes Beam AI different from naive AI solutions is its architecture. Instead of trying to be 100% autonomous (and failing), Attentive.ai built a human-in-the-loop model. Each automated takeoff passes through a quality assurance layer performed by construction experts before delivery. This hybrid approach delivers what the company calls “outcomes as a service,” contractors get finished, verified takeoffs they can plug directly into their pricing systems.
“Unlike AI-assisted tools that still require users to click, trace, and label drawings, we produce ready-to-use material quantities and assemblies within 24 to 72 hours,” Dhawan said. “Each output goes through a human QA layer to ensure field accuracy, giving estimators confidence to use the platform’s outputs directly for pricing, quoting, or importing into estimating systems.”
This combination of AI precision with human verification is what sets Attentive.ai apart. It’s not a tool that makes estimators’ jobs easier, it’s a tool that eliminates most of their work while maintaining the trust required for mission-critical business decisions.
Beyond Takeoffs
With $30.5 million in new capital, Attentive.ai isn’t stopping at takeoffs. The company plans to expand into the entire preconstruction lifecycle including estimating, bidding, and collaboration workflows.
Nikitas Koutoupes, Managing Director at Insight Partners, signaled investor confidence in this roadmap: “Attentive has established itself as a clear category leader in AI-driven construction takeoffs. Its combination of advanced AI with human-in-the-loop QA delivers immediate ROI, helping customers save time, bid faster, win more projects, and boost productivity.”
The capital will also fund international expansion. As large-scale infrastructure projects accelerate globally, construction companies worldwide face the same problem. Manual preconstruction bottlenecks. Attentive.ai’s platform can scale globally.
Attentive.ai’s success shows something important about AI in enterprise software. The winners aren’t the companies with the most impressive models or the most autonomous systems.
They’re the companies that solve specific, expensive problems with solutions that teams trust to do real work. Beam AI saves estimators 20 hours per week. That’s not flashy AI. That’s just valuable.
Construction, despite being a multi-trillion dollar industry, has been virtually untouched by digital transformation. Spreadsheets still dominate. Manual processes dictate timelines. Attentive.ai is proving that AI doesn’t need to replace human judgment, it just needs to eliminate the repetitive, time-consuming work that keeps professionals from making strategic decisions.
