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.


