The future of architecture · The future of construction estimating
Design it. Price it.
Kanopi produces permit-ready architectural plans and permit-quality bids from the same model. AI agent teams, trained under real professional architects and master estimators, run by live human orchestrators. The building you design feeds the bid you price. One model, both answers.
30 yrs
Architectural practice behind the training
30 yrs
Construction estimating mastery
$100Ms
In completed projects behind the numbers
Live
Human orchestrators on every engagement
Why we exist
Every craft's mastery has always died with its masters. Architecture and estimating are about to be the first that don't.
Thirty years of drafting judgment. Thirty years of knowing what a building actually costs. Today that knowledge retires one practitioner at a time, and every firm starts over from zero. Kanopi captures it, verifies it, and compounds it, so the best decisions ever made on a job site or a drafting table get made on every project that follows. That is the future of architecture. That is the future of construction estimating. We are building it with the masters, not instead of them.
Two services, one model
Architects don't price. Estimators don't design. Kanopi does both.
Kanopi Design
Cut architectural costs by 40%.
An AI team led by a human orchestrator collaborates with you to produce your full, permit-ready Revit plan set. A licensed architect reviews and stamps it. You skip the six-figure invoice and the months of back-and-forth.
Get a plan set quoteKanopi Estimate
A real bid. In minutes.
An AI team led by a human estimator turns your plan set into a permit-quality bid in minutes, not days. Calibrated to your subs, your overhead, and your history, not a generic cost book. Accurate to within margin of error on real projects.
Normally $3,350 to $3,750 a bid. Free during beta.
Get a free bidThe unlock
Design and price from one model.
Kanopi's Revit model flows straight into the estimate, BIM-direct. No re-drawing, no second takeoff, no gap between the plans and the price. Nobody else has both halves.
Who trains it
Not trained on the internet. Trained under masters.
Every skill in the engine traces to a named human master working in their own discipline, on real projects, with real consequences. This is the moat: you cannot scrape what was never written down.
30 years
Real professional architects
The drafting skills are trained under licensed architects three decades into practice, captured in their own workflow, on permit sets that actually get sealed and submitted. Apprenticeship at machine scale, with the master's hands on the wheel.
$100Ms built
Master estimators
The pricing engine is calibrated by estimators who have bid, built, and reconciled hundreds of millions of dollars of completed construction. Every rate in the library traces to work that went vertical, not to a cost book's national average.
Always on
Live orchestrators
Every engagement runs under a human orchestrator directing the agent team in real time: sequencing the work, catching the edge cases, owning the client relationship. The machine compounds. The judgment stays human.
The Skill Engine
Software you don't install. A workforce you train.
Most AI tools are prompts wrapped around a model. Kanopi is built on generative skill learning: agents that acquire drafting and estimating ability the way an apprentice does, by working under a master, having every move corrected, and never making the same mistake twice. The difference is that our apprentice compounds across every project, forever.
Observe the master
A licensed architect drafts the way they always have. Underneath, Kanopi captures the work at the operation level: every Revit command, every sequence, every correction, streamed through a 138-tool programmatic control surface for the full Autodesk environment. Not screen recording. The actual action stream, with the geometry it produced.
BIM-native capture · full action telemetry
Encode into skills
Sessions are distilled into skills: versioned, executable procedures with preconditions, tolerances, and the code sections they satisfy. A skill is not a prompt. It is a tested unit of professional judgment, written down precisely enough that an agent can run it and a human can audit it.
Versioned like source code · auditable line by line
Verify against reality
Every skill runs a gauntlet before it enters the library: deterministic geometry checks, egress and clearance math, rated-assembly rules, IBC and IEBC gates. An agent must produce the same plan twice from the same inputs before we trust it once. Probabilistic output, deterministic acceptance.
Code-grounded gates · reproducibility required
Compound the library
Skills compose. Wall placement becomes unit layout. Unit layout becomes a floor stack. A floor stack becomes a full permit set with sheets, schedules, and annotations. Every new project regression-tests the whole library against everything it has ever drawn, so ability only moves one direction.
Composable hierarchy · regression-tested on real projects
Seal the loop
A licensed architect reviews and stamps every set. Every redline they make flows back as a training signal, corrected at the skill level, not the output level. The library gets the lesson permanently. This is the loop: the master teaches, the system compounds, the stamp stays human.
Human seal · every correction becomes curriculum
Run it on our own buildings first
We don't train on hypotheticals. The Skill Engine drafts our own projects, with our own capital at risk, before it touches anyone else's. On 301 W Osborn the Design agents built the Revit model and caught and fixed their own errors with no human in the loop. That standard is the product.
Calibrated on owned projects · skin in the game
Why nobody else has this
Language models guess.
Buildings can't.
Getting a probabilistic model to act inside a deterministic discipline is the hardest problem in applied AI. An inch is not a token. A bearing wall is not a suggestion. This is what we spent the hard years building.
- The action-space problem
- A chat model picks the next word from a vocabulary. A drafting agent picks the next operation from an effectively infinite space of geometry, constraints, and code requirements, where one wrong move invalidates a hundred downstream decisions. We solved this with skills: pre-verified procedures that collapse the space to moves a master would actually make.
- The verification problem
- There is no autocomplete for life safety. Every output has to clear deterministic gates: dimensional tolerance, egress math, structural grid discipline, code citation. We built the gauntlet before we built the agents, which is the opposite order from everyone else, and the reason our errors get caught by software instead of by plan reviewers.
- The knowledge problem
- The internet knows what buildings look like. It does not know how an architect decides. That knowledge lives in working sessions, redlines, and thirty-year habits that have never been written down. Our capture pipeline is the only one we know of that harvests it at the operation level, with the practitioner's consent and participation, inside their own workflow.
- The calibration problem
- Design and price share one model, so every drawing decision must survive contact with a real budget. Our estimating engine is anchored to projects that were bid, built, and reconciled against firm cost. When the agents draw, they draw inside numbers that have already been proven on job sites, not inside a cost book's averages.
The result is a system that cannot be copied by training on the public internet, because the thing it knows doesn't exist on the public internet. It exists in the hands of the masters we train under, one verified skill at a time.
The proof
-7.1%
Kanopi Estimate came in 7.1% under actual built cost on the 65th Street calibration, within margin of error.
Self-correcting
On 301 W Osborn, our own building, the Design agents built the Revit model and caught and fixed real errors with no human in the loop.
~$250K
What the 301 in-house build is saving versus an outside architect. Built by an operator who builds, on his own projects first.
Estimate accuracy is topline on a full project, not a cherry-picked line item. Line-level validation is in development.
Inside Kanopi Estimate
Four things every other tool can't do.
Autonomous takeoff
Drop a plan PDF. Vision AI reads the sheets, classifies them, extracts quantities — automatically. You review, you don't redo.
vs. competitors: PlanSwift, Bluebeam — hours of manual click-to-measure
Calibrated to your shop
We learn from your past bids, your subs, your overhead, your history. The same project bid by you and bid by your competitor produces two different numbers — both correct.
vs. competitors: Sage, STACK, ProEst — generic RSMeans, identical to peers
Live market pricing
BLS Producer Price Index feed, daily 1build material prices, live tariff watch on imported categories. Quotes update with the market, not with the next quarterly software release.
vs. competitors: Most catalogs update quarterly, often months stale
Confidence on every line
Each line shows where the number came from — quoted by a sub, measured from the plan, assumed from history, or budgeted as an allowance. Owners trust transparent bids more than perfect-looking ones.
vs. competitors: Industry standard: opaque lump-sum totals
The competitive landscape
Every category leader.
One blind spot.
Kanopi against the tools most contractors evaluate today. Compare on what matters: setup time, plan ingestion, pricing data source, and customization to your shop.
| Capability | Kanopi | Sage Estimating | PlanSwift | STACK | ProEst |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier | Mid, priced like SMB | Enterprise | Mid | Mid | Mid |
| Annual cost | $1.5K-3K | $10K-25K+ | ~$2.4K | $2.4K-4.8K | ~$5K |
| Setup time | Days | 6-12 weeks | 1-2 weeks | 2-4 weeks | 2-4 weeks |
| Plan-set ingestion | Autonomous (Vision AI) | Manual takeoff | Manual takeoff | Manual + AI assist | Manual |
| Pricing data | Live BLS PPI + 1build + your history | RSMeans static | User catalog | RSMeans + user | Generic |
| Customization to your shop | Automatic, learns from your bids | High (manual build) | Moderate | Low | Low |
| Bid types | Fixed / Cost-Plus / T&M | Fixed only | Fixed | Fixed | Fixed |
| Confidence per line | Quoted / Takeoff / Assumed / Allowance | No | No | No | No |
| Margin-of-error band | Yes, narrows by plan stage | No | No | No | No |
Pricing and setup ranges based on publicly available information and buyer interviews, 2025-2026. Approximate. Implementation timelines assume a single estimator with no prior platform experience.
Who it's for
Developers, general contractors, and subcontractors. Any size. Any region.
Developers and owner-builders come for Design: permit-ready plans without the six-figure fee. GCs and subs come for Estimate: real bids in minutes. Architects come to multiply a practice they spent a career building. We're horizontal across building construction, residential, commercial, hospitality, multifamily. We integrate with what you already use.
For architects & master builders
Your craft, multiplied.
Your stamp, untouched.
The architects and estimators who train Kanopi don't get replaced by it. They get leverage no firm has ever had: an agent team that drafts the way they draft, prices the way they price, and works around the clock under their direction. Review and seal what once took a back office to produce. Take on the projects you used to turn away.
- Orchestrate, don't grind. You direct the agent team and own the judgment calls. The production work runs underneath you.
- Your knowledge becomes an asset. The skills trained from your practice are versioned, attributed, and yours to wield, a body of work that compounds instead of retiring with you.
- Ground floor of the category. The masters who train the first skills shape what the profession's next instrument becomes.
The instrument, in numbers
- Control surface
- 138 programmatic tools across the Autodesk environment. Agents act in BIM, not chat about it.
- Acceptance standard
- Deterministic geometry, egress, and code gates. Same inputs must produce the same plan, twice, before a skill ships.
- Proving ground
- Our own buildings, our own capital. The system earns its way onto your projects by performing on ours first.
- Partners & capital
- Category-defining platforms get built once. Serious partnership and investment conversations are welcome through the form below.
What it costs to wait
A mid-size GC bidding eight jobs a month.
Today
- 1 estimator full-time
- $90,000 / yr
- Sage + Excel macros
- $18,000 / yr
- Bluebeam (3 seats)
- $1,800 / yr
- Manual takeoff: 6 hrs/bid
- ~600 hrs / yr
- Generic pricing: margin slip
- −2 to −5%
Net result
~$110K/yr in estimating function + 2-5% margin slip on every bid from generic pricing data.
With Kanopi
Same estimator. 3× throughput. Tighter margins. Same person bids twenty-four jobs a month, not eight.
Get started
Price a project,
or quote a plan set.
Estimate is in beta, so bids are free for contractors right now. Send a project you've already bid and we'll show you the difference. For Design, tell us the project and we'll send a fixed plan-set quote. No 90-minute discovery call.
Architects interested in training with us, and partners or investors who want a closer look: use the same form and say so. We read everything.