Bobyard

Cover Block

PUBLIC

Field	Value
Name	Bobyard
Tagline	AI platform automating construction takeoffs and estimates using CV and NLP models
Headquarters	San Francisco, United States
Founded	2023
Stage	Series A
Business Model	SaaS
Industry	Construction technology
Technology Type	AI / Machine Learning (computer vision and NLP)
Geography	North America
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Michael Ding (founder)
Funding Label	$10M+
Total Disclosed	~$38.6M across two rounds

Links

PUBLIC

• Website: https://www.bobyard.com
• Wellfound: https://wellfound.com/company/bobyard
• Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bobyard

Executive Summary

PUBLIC

Bobyard sells an AI system that automates construction takeoffs, the line-by-line counting and measuring of materials from blueprints that contractors must complete before they can bid a job. The company was founded in 2023 in San Francisco by Michael Ding and has raised roughly $38.6 million across a 2023 seed and a December 2025 Series A led by 8VC, with participation from Pear VC, Primary Venture Partners, Tishman Speyer, RXR, Caffeinated Capital and Merrick Ventures [BusinessWire, Dec 2025] [Crunchbase]. The product applies computer vision and natural language processing to construction drawings to count objects and measure lengths and areas automatically, with the company claiming estimates can be produced roughly ten times faster than manual workflows [Crunchbase] [Wellfound]. The investor base is unusual in that it combines classic enterprise SaaS funds (Pear, Primary, 8VC) with two large commercial real estate owners, Tishman Speyer and RXR, suggesting an early channel into general contractors and developer-led procurement [Pear VC, Dec 2025]. In February 2026 the company expanded beyond general construction by launching an Irrigation Takeoff product in partnership with Horizon Distributors, signaling a vertical land-and-expand approach starting with landscaping [Landscape Management, Feb 2026]. Headcount sits in the 11 to 50 range per Wellfound, which implies the Series A capital is largely forward-looking rather than supporting an already-built sales organization [Wellfound]. Over the next 12 to 18 months the watch items are conversion of the strategic LP relationships into named enterprise contracts, the depth of the irrigation vertical pilot, and whether competitors such as Togal.AI and Kreo close the gap on multi-trade coverage.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by BusinessWire, Crunchbase, Pear VC and Wellfound.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis	Value
Stage	Series A (Dec 2025)
Business Model	SaaS
Industry / Vertical	Construction estimating and preconstruction
Technology Type	Computer vision and NLP applied to drawings
Geography	North America (HQ San Francisco)
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Michael Ding (founder)
Funding	~$38.6M total disclosed

Company Overview

PUBLIC

Bobyard was founded in 2023 in San Francisco to attack one of the most labor-intensive workflows in commercial construction: the takeoff, in which estimators read architectural and engineering drawings and manually count every door, fixture, length of pipe and square foot of material that a bid will need to price [Crunchbase] [Pear VC]. The thesis, in the company's own framing on its blog, is that takeoffs and estimating are the upstream choke point that determines whether a contractor can bid more jobs and win them at better margin, "the biggest unlock for construction productivity" [Bobyard]. Founder Michael Ding incorporated the business and raised a seed round of approximately $3.63 million in December 2023, with Pear VC and Primary Venture Partners among the early backers [Crunchbase, Dec 2023] [Crunchbase].

The company operated quietly through 2024 and most of 2025 before announcing a $35 million Series A on December 10, 2025, led by 8VC, with Pear VC, Primary Venture Partners, Tishman Speyer, RXR, Caffeinated Capital and Merrick Ventures participating [BusinessWire, Dec 2025] [Finsmes, Dec 2025]. The inclusion of Tishman Speyer and RXR, two of the larger commercial landlords in the United States, was reported as a strategic signal rather than a purely financial one [Pear VC, Dec 2025] [8VC]. 8VC published a partnership note framing the investment as a bet on "plans to progress" automation across the preconstruction stack [8VC].

The most recent product milestone on record is the February 2026 launch of an Irrigation Takeoff product developed with Horizon Distributors, a national irrigation and landscape supply distributor [Landscape Management, Feb 2026]. The pairing extends the original general-construction product into a specific trade vertical with a built-in distribution partner.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, BusinessWire, Pear VC and Landscape Management.

Product and Technology

MIXED

Bobyard's core product reads construction drawings (typically PDF plan sets) and uses computer vision to detect, count and measure objects on the page, while NLP models parse legends, schedules and specification text to map those objects to priced line items [Wellfound] [Crunchbase]. The published claim is that this lets an estimator produce a takeoff and cost estimate roughly ten times faster than the manual click-and-count workflows that dominate the industry today, with fewer transcription errors [Crunchbase, Unknown]. That speed claim is single-sourced to the company's own profile copy and should be treated as a marketing figure rather than a benchmarked result [PUBLIC]. The platform is positioned as horizontal across construction trades, with the December 2025 funding announcement describing it as serving contractors broadly [BusinessWire, Dec 2025] [PUBLIC].

The February 2026 Irrigation Takeoff release is the first publicly disclosed vertical-specific module, and it is delivered jointly with Horizon Distributors, which gives Bobyard a route to landscape contractors who already buy materials through Horizon [Landscape Management, Feb 2026] [PUBLIC]. The Wellfound profile lists the company's markets as SaaS, Enterprise Software, Artificial Intelligence, Construction and Computer Vision, which is consistent with a horizontal estimating platform that is now beginning to wrap trade-specific catalogs and workflows around the core CV/NLP engine [Wellfound] [PUBLIC]. The same profile shows active hiring across engineering, sales, marketing and operations, suggesting the Series A is being deployed into a go-to-market build rather than a pure research effort [Wellfound] [PRIVATE].

No public information confirms the model architecture, whether Bobyard trains proprietary detection models or fine-tunes open foundation models, or how customer drawings are handled for training. Investors evaluating the technical moat will want to ask directly about training data ownership, drawing ingestion accuracy benchmarks by trade, and integration with estimating systems such as Sage, ProEst or Trimble.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product description confirmed by multiple sources; the 10x speed claim is single-sourced to company copy.

Market Research and Opportunity

PUBLIC

Preconstruction estimating is one of the largest pools of skilled human labor in construction that has not yet been substantively automated, and that is the market Bobyard is addressing.

No third-party market sizing report for AI-driven construction takeoff software was confirmed in the cited research, so a precise TAM figure is not publicly available here. What is documented is the structural setup: construction is roughly 4 percent of US GDP, and estimators inside general contractors and specialty trades spend the majority of their time on manual quantity takeoff before any bid can be priced, a workflow Bobyard's investors describe as the upstream gate to productivity in the sector [Pear VC, Dec 2025] [Bobyard]. The company's own framing is that compressing that gate is what allows more bids per estimator and therefore more revenue per contractor [Bobyard].

The demand drivers that the cited press coverage surfaces are three. First, a persistent labor shortage in skilled estimating roles, which makes per-estimator throughput the binding constraint for many contractors [BusinessWire, Dec 2025]. Second, the maturation of computer vision models to the point where they can reliably parse engineering line work, which is what made the category investable in the 2023 to 2025 window [Pear VC, Dec 2025]. Third, the entry of large real estate owners, in Bobyard's case Tishman Speyer and RXR, into the cap table of construction software companies, which signals owner-side appetite to push productivity tools down to their general contractors [Pear VC, Dec 2025] [8VC].

Adjacent and substitute markets matter for how the opportunity gets priced. The closest substitute is incumbent estimating software (Trimble, Sage Estimating, ProEst, STACK, PlanSwift), which automates the post-takeoff pricing step but still relies on human click-counting for the takeoff itself. Adjacent categories include BIM-based quantity extraction (Autodesk Construction Cloud) and bid management platforms (Building Connected, now part of Autodesk). Regulatory and macro forces are largely tailwinds: there is no specific regulator that gates estimating software, and infrastructure spend in the US under the IIJA continues to support contractor backlogs.

Reference point	Value	Source
Bobyard total disclosed funding	~$38.6M	[Crunchbase]
Series A round size (Dec 2025)	$35M	[BusinessWire, Dec 2025]
Reported speed improvement vs. manual takeoff	10x (company claim)	[Crunchbase]

The table above is the only quantification the public record currently supports for Bobyard specifically; readers should treat the 10x figure as a marketing benchmark and the funding figures as confirmed.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Funding numbers confirmed by multiple sources; market sizing not independently sourced.

Competitive Landscape

MIXED

Bobyard sits in a small but suddenly well-funded cohort of AI-native takeoff companies competing against entrenched estimating incumbents and against the emerging takeoff modules from larger construction software platforms.

Company	Positioning	Stage / Funding	Notable Differentiator	Source
Bobyard	AI takeoff and estimating, horizontal with vertical modules	Series A, ~$38.6M total	Combined CV + NLP, owner-side investors (Tishman Speyer, RXR), irrigation vertical with Horizon	[BusinessWire, Dec 2025] [Landscape Management, Feb 2026]
Togal.AI	AI floor plan measurement and takeoff	Early stage, venture-backed	Early mover in CV-based plan measurement, focus on general contractors	[PUBLIC]
Beam AI	AI estimating and preconstruction	Early stage	Estimating workflow focus	[PUBLIC]
Kreo	AI takeoff and estimating, UK origin	Growth stage	European footprint, BIM-leaning workflow	[PUBLIC]
Rebar AI	AI takeoff for rebar / structural detailing	Early stage	Trade-specific depth in rebar	[PUBLIC]

The competitive map breaks into three layers. The incumbent layer is the legacy estimating stack (Trimble, Sage, STACK, PlanSwift, ProEst), which owns the pricing database and the contractor relationship but treats takeoff as a manual upstream step. The AI-native challenger layer is where Bobyard, Togal.AI, Beam AI, Kreo and Rebar AI sit, each attempting to take the takeoff step out of human hands. The adjacent-platform layer is Autodesk Construction Cloud and Procore, which can plausibly bolt AI takeoff onto existing distribution if the category proves out.

Where Bobyard appears to have a defensible edge today is in the combination of its capital base and its strategic investor mix. Among the named challengers, Bobyard's $35 million Series A is one of the larger disclosed rounds in the AI-takeoff cohort, and the participation of Tishman Speyer and RXR is a distribution asset that pure financial competitors cannot replicate quickly [BusinessWire, Dec 2025] [Pear VC, Dec 2025]. Owners pushing tools onto their general contractors is one of the few ways software gets adopted at speed in this industry. That edge is real but perishable: once a competitor closes a comparable strategic round, the advantage compresses.

Where Bobyard is most exposed is on two fronts. First, trade depth: Rebar AI's narrow focus on structural rebar detailing illustrates how a vertical specialist can build a more accurate model for one trade than a horizontal player can match across all of them, and Bobyard's irrigation launch is an implicit acknowledgement that vertical packaging matters [Landscape Management, Feb 2026]. Second, distribution through the existing estimating stack: if Trimble or Autodesk ships an adequate AI takeoff feature inside the system contractors already pay for, the standalone takeoff category compresses into a feature.

The most plausible 18-month scenario is a winner-takes-most race within the AI-native cohort for the multi-trade GC segment, while trade specialists hold defensible niches. Winner if Bobyard converts the Tishman Speyer and RXR relationships into named enterprise contracts and ships two more vertical modules at the cadence of the irrigation launch. Loser if Autodesk Construction Cloud ships a credible native takeoff capability before the AI-native cohort locks in switching costs at large general contractors.

Opportunity

PUBLIC

If the takeoff workflow gets fully automated in the next decade, the company that owns it owns the upstream data layer of every construction bid in North America, and Bobyard is one of a small number of credible candidates for that position.

The headline opportunity. The single largest outcome Bobyard could plausibly become is the default preconstruction intelligence layer that sits between drawing sets and the estimating stack for most US general contractors and large specialty trades. The cited evidence makes that outcome reachable rather than aspirational for three reasons: a $35 million Series A from a tier-one syndicate gives the company three to four years of runway to compound product accuracy [BusinessWire, Dec 2025]; the presence of Tishman Speyer and RXR on the cap table provides a top-down distribution path to the general contractors those owners hire [Pear VC, Dec 2025] [8VC]; and the Horizon Distributors partnership demonstrates a repeatable bottom-up channel through trade distributors who already control buying behavior in their verticals [Landscape Management, Feb 2026].

Growth scenarios.

Scenario	What happens	Catalyst	Why it's plausible
Owner-mandated standard	Tishman Speyer and RXR require their GCs to submit bids using Bobyard takeoffs on new developments, and other large owners follow	Pilot rollout on a flagship Tishman Speyer or RXR project	Both owners are on the cap table and have public incentive to push productivity downstream [Pear VC, Dec 2025] [8VC]
Vertical land-and-expand	The irrigation module template repeats across roofing, electrical, plumbing and concrete, each with a national distributor partner	Two more distributor partnerships modeled on Horizon	Horizon launch in Feb 2026 demonstrates the playbook is shippable [Landscape Management, Feb 2026]
Estimating-stack acquisition	Trimble, Autodesk or Procore acquires Bobyard to keep AI takeoff inside their suite rather than build it	A competing AI-takeoff acquisition triggers a defensive bid	Autodesk's prior acquisition of Building Connected establishes the pattern of buying preconstruction tools [PUBLIC]

What compounding looks like. The flywheel for Bobyard is a data flywheel sitting on top of a distribution flywheel. Every drawing set processed improves the accuracy of object detection on the next set, particularly for trade-specific symbology where training data is scarce; each vertical module Bobyard ships, starting with irrigation, deepens that trade-specific corpus and makes the next module faster to ship [Landscape Management, Feb 2026]. On the distribution side, every owner that adopts Bobyard pushes adoption down to dozens of general contractors who push it down to hundreds of subcontractors, and once a contractor's pricing database is wired into Bobyard, switching cost rises sharply. The Series A is large enough to fund both loops in parallel rather than sequentially [BusinessWire, Dec 2025].

The size of the win. A useful comparable, though not a forecast, is Autodesk's 2018 acquisition of PlanGrid for $875 million and of Building Connected for $275 million, which together established that preconstruction software is a category where strategic acquirers will pay several hundred million dollars for category leadership. If Bobyard executes the owner-mandated standard scenario and reaches a position comparable to those preconstruction leaders, an outcome in the high hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars is in range (scenario, not a forecast). The downside-bounded version of the same scenario, in which Bobyard wins the irrigation and one or two adjacent verticals but does not become the GC-side standard, still supports a meaningful vertical SaaS outcome.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Funding, partnership and investor facts confirmed by multiple sources; scenario sizing relies on named comparables rather than direct projections.

Sources

PUBLIC

1. [Crunchbase] Bobyard - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bobyard

2. [BusinessWire, Dec 2025] Bobyard Raises $35 Million Series A to Power How the World Gets Built | https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251210946193/en/Bobyard-Raises-$35-Million-Series-A-to-Power-How-the-World-Gets-Built

3. [Wellfound] Bobyard Careers - Insights and Opportunities | https://wellfound.com/company/bobyard

4. [Pear VC, Dec 2025] Bobyard raises $35M Series A to power how the world gets built | https://pear.vc/bobyard-series-a/

5. [Crunchbase, Dec 2023] Seed Round - Bobyard - 2023-12-12 | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/bobyard-seed--37897791

6. [Crunchbase] Bobyard - Financial Details | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bobyard/company_financials

7. [Bobyard, Dec 2025] Celebrating Our $35M Series A | https://www.bobyard.com/blogs/series-a-announcement

8. [Bobyard] Why Takeoffs and Estimating Are the Biggest Unlock for Construction Productivity | https://www.bobyard.com/blogs/why-takeoffs-and-estimating-are-the-biggest-unlock-for-construction-productivity

9. [Finsmes, Dec 2025] Bobyard Raises $35M in Series A Funding | https://www.finsmes.com/2025/12/bobyard-raises-35m-in-series-a-funding.html

10. [Built In San Francisco, Dec 2025] Bobyard Raises $35M to Advance AI-Powered Construction Takeoffs | https://www.builtinsf.com/articles/bobyard-raises-35m-to-advance-ai-powered-construction-takeoffs-20251211

11. [The SaaS News, Dec 2025] Bobyard Raises $35 Million in Series A | https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/bobyard-raises-35-million-in-series-a

12. [8VC] From Plans to Progress: Announcing the 8VC-Bobyard Partnership | https://www.8vc.com/resources/from-plans-to-progress-announcing-the-8vc-bobyard-partnership

13. [Landscape Management, Feb 2026] Bobyard raises $35 Million Series A | https://www.landscapemanagement.net/bobyard-raises-35-million-series-a/

14. [Artiverse] Bobyard Raises $35M to Help Contractors Bid Faster With AI | https://www.artiverse.ca/bobyard-raises-35m-to-help-contractors-bid-faster-with-ai/