Buildcheck, a company whose software reviews construction drawings, has raised a $12 million Series A. CEO Alexander Michalatos announced the round in a letter on the company’s site dated September 9, 2026, and the site’s banner says Telescope Ventures led it. AEC Magazine covered the raise on October 7. The work it targets is design review: the back-check a general contractor’s preconstruction, quality or MEP team runs on each drawing set to catch errors before they turn into RFIs and change orders.
What it does
The input is the drawing set as 2D PDFs. AEC Magazine reports that Buildcheck needs no BIM model, metadata or special export. Its computer vision models (software trained to recognize objects in images, here tags, dimensions, pipes and columns on a sheet) read each drawing for its components, geometry and spatial relationships. Buildcheck says this lets it catch a pipe drawn through a column, which an AI model that reads only the text on a sheet would miss.
AEC Magazine lists four kinds of checks:
- Drawing health, such as missing tags and dimensions, sheet index mismatches and broken detail references.
- 2D clash detection, such as ceiling devices that collide, pipes through columns and slab edges that do not line up.
- Omissions and rule checks, such as a pump with no power, an under-rated door in a fire-rated wall, or an electrical panel that appears on the floor plan and differs on the single-line diagram.
- Spec-to-drawing checks, where the drawings and the written specification contradict each other.
Michalatos’s letter says the product can also turn a contractor’s own QA/QC playbook into custom review agents, isolate the changes between drawing revisions, identify code issues and point out value-engineering opportunities. The output is a list of comments. Buildcheck says its in-house experts review every AI finding before the customer sees it, confirming each issue and setting its severity.
So the daily users are the people who mark up drawing sets today: preconstruction managers, project engineers, MEP coordinators and quality managers. Owners and architects use it too, according to the customer logos and testimonials on Buildcheck’s website.
Evidence so far
The evidence so far is the CEO’s Series A letter and the claims and customer testimonials on Buildcheck’s website. These are the figures Buildcheck has published:
| Claim | Figure | Where Buildcheck states it |
|---|---|---|
| Drawings reviewed to date | More than 150,000 | Series A letter |
| Comments flagged to date | More than 115,000 | Series A letter |
| Projects with significant life-safety comments | 2 in 3 | Series A letter |
| Paying customers | More than 110 | Series A letter |
| Return on investment | 10x to 35x | Website |
| Relevant issues caught compared with manual review | 50% or more | Website |
| Primex Investments savings | $541,000 and 27 days | Website |
| Fitzrovia savings | $221,000 and 2 days | Website |
The volume figures work out to roughly three comments for every four drawings reviewed. The letter names DPR Construction, EllisDon, Power Construction, IMC Construction and EMJ Construction among the paying customers, with work across data centers, healthcare, commercial and residential projects.
Buildcheck offers the Primex and Fitzrovia case studies to readers who contact it. How the ROI range and the 50% comparison were calculated, and the AI’s false-positive rate (the share of its raw flags that turn out not to be real issues) before expert review, are not yet public.
The customer comments describe the work the software takes on. Kevin Weckman, quality support manager at Power Construction, says on the site: “Every new drawing set, we spend several hours manually back-checking every sheet.” DPR’s Zach Murphy says the software helps DPR’s reviewers spend more of their time on critical issues. An earlier post here covered ARCH-B, an academic benchmark that tests how well AI models read building drawings.
How to measure it on your projects
Track design-error RFIs per 100 sheets. Count the RFIs on a job that trace to an error, omission or conflict already present in the issued drawings, divide by the number of sheets in the set, and multiply by 100. Dividing by sheet count lets a small tenant improvement and a large hospital sit in the same comparison.
Capture the baseline before a pilot:
- Pick 5 recently completed or late-stage jobs with full RFI logs.
- Tag each RFI by cause, and keep the ones caused by the documents.
- Record the sheet count of the set those RFIs were written against.
- Record the hours your team spent back-checking each drawing revision, if your timesheets carry a code for it.
In a pilot, run the tool on a new set before it goes out for bid or construction, log which of its comments your team would have missed, and then track the RFI rate on that job as it builds. The change order rate by cause uses the same tagging and pairs well with this metric.
A first step this week is to pull the RFI log on one active job and tag each RFI as design-caused or not.
Availability and cost
Buildcheck works from 2D PDF drawing sets, so a contractor can run it on a set from any design team. Its website starts sales through a scheduled call, and prices are not posted there. The site’s banner says the round will expand four new products, and Michalatos’s letter says the company is hiring engineers, salespeople, researchers and builders.