Pirros, a technology platform dedicated to enhancing the efficiency of managing drawing sets for architecture and engineering firms, proudly announced today its successful $2 million seed funding round. This investment comes from a group of investors and advisors boasting extensive industry connections.
The funding round boasts notable contributors, such as angel investors Carl Bass, former CEO of Autodesk; Joseph Walla from HelloSign; and Ryan Sutton-Gee of the construction software firm PlanGrid. In addition, esteemed venture capital firms like YCombinator, FundersClub, and Twenty Two Ventures actively participated in this seed round.
A Centralized, Searchable Solution
Pirros stands as a valuable tool designed to streamline the management of design details for architecture and engineering firms. It accomplishes this by automatically categorizing and cataloging the primary output of design professionals: the extensive drawing sets that these firms create for various building and infrastructure projects each year.
Presently, many firms grapple with a highly inefficient approach to design details. This inefficiency arises from the storage of these valuable assets on on-premises servers, which makes it challenging to retrieve and reuse them. Consequently, architects and engineers often find themselves recreating drawings for each project, thereby sacrificing the quality control procedures applied during their initial creation.
Pirros eliminates these inefficiencies, enabling architects and engineers to allocate more time to design by automatically aggregating and storing information. This approach ensures that all the company’s output is systematically managed in a centralized and easily searchable platform, facilitating future re-use.
Empowering Architects and Engineers
Ari Baranian, CEO and co-founder of Pirros, shared in an interview with VentureBeat: “Every company has tried to build out a small catalog, so about a couple of hundred details, and these will be the most common details that they’ve used … There’s just never been the tools to expand the catalog beyond 100, 200, or even 500 details.”
He further emphasized, “Now, our average company has over 10,000 [searchable] details on the platform. So with that ability, any new architect, any new engineer that joins the firm, quickly gets up to speed on the different standards of that office.”
The widespread adoption of Pirros by some of the industry’s major players underscores its efficacy. Over 30 firms, including prominent architecture companies like KPFF Engineers and RAMSA, are already utilizing the software.
Harnessing AI for Streamlined Design
Pirros harnesses metadata from building information models (BIMs) used by firms to create their drawing sets. This data is extracted and indexed into a searchable and reusable catalog of 2D assets. Clustering algorithms are applied to group similar details, facilitating users in selecting the most suitable version.
The platform seamlessly integrates with existing tools and workflows of any firm, making the onboarding process simple. Firms only need to identify the models they wish to incorporate into their Pirros catalog, and the platform handles the rest through its integration pipeline.
Significantly Reducing Drafting Work
Customers, particularly the younger architects and engineers who are avid users of the platform, have expressed positive feedback about Pirros.
Ari Baranian commented, “Seeing the amount of traction that we’ve gotten with the youngest architects and engineers was surprising to us, but also super motivating to see that we’re actually making an impact there.”
Pirros intends to employ the $2 million seed funding to expand its team, enhance its product, and broaden its market presence. One of the upcoming features that Baranian anticipates with excitement is the use of AI to automatically identify the best versions of every detail and offer users suggestions and recommendations.
Pirros stands as a trailblazer in the field of architectural detail management, an area often overlooked by other technology platforms. By addressing this specific problem, Pirros aims to revolutionize the way buildings are designed and documented.
As Baranian succinctly puts it: “We built our product exactly as we would have wanted to use it.”
