By Max Scheinblum

Copyright denverpost

LightTable is developing artificial intelligence — for developers.

The Denver startup, founded in 2024, announced its first round of funding last month, saying it raised $6 million. Co-founder Paul Zeckser said his software helps developers clean up errors more quickly and accurately than the current process, which entails sending construction plans out to third-party reviewers.

“The peer review process takes weeks and weeks, and sometimes more than a month,” said Zeckser, who is LightTable’s CEO. “We can do it in 30 minutes. It’s faster and better and we can deliver this at a lower cost.”

Developers upload their site plans and LightTable’s AI agent does the rest. The software currently catches between 60% and 65% of all errors, which include anything from discrepancies to mismeasurements, according to Zeckser. A year from now, he said, it’ll catch around 90% of errors.

That’s a big difference from where the market is today, he said. If a developer plugs plans into ChatGPT or another widely available chatbot, Zeckser said it might catch up to 15% of the problems. With current peer review, that number is around 50%.

“And that’s not a function of expertise,” Zeckser noted of the human process. “It’s a function of how voluminous, how massive these construction documents are.

“They could be a couple thousand pages filled with hundreds of hundreds of drawings,” he said of the packages. “With weeks or months to review everything, it’s just impossible.”

So far, LightTable has analyzed 2.5 million square feet across 50 projects, including apartment buildings and retail. By the end of the year, Zeckser expects that number to sit around 10 million, with hospitals, data centers and labs added to the fold.

Zeckser said LightTable is working with two of the biggest multifamily developers in the country, including Florida-based Mill Creek Residential. Clients pay a price per square foot on each individual project.

Zeckser estimated that 5% to 7% of the total cost of development goes to fixing errors made in plans.

Between the time and money saved, he said he believes LightTable’s value speaks for itself. He compared it with manufacturing and services industries switching from manual quality assurance to an automated process.

“If you can do a better job of finding errors, finding omissions, areas where projects aren’t coordinated, then when you go into the construction process, you’ll have less delays and less change orders,” Zeckser said.

Ben Waters, Zeckser’s co-founder and a former architect at Gensler, pioneered the idea at an incubator through New York City firm Primary Venture Partners. The fund connected the founding team, which also includes Dan Becker, LightTable’s chief technology officer. Waters heads up growth for the business.

With the $6 million raise, which Primary led, LightTable has doubled its team from five people to 10. In the next four to six months, Zeckser said it might add another five people to its office at the Venture X space in LoDo. About half of the staff are AI and software engineers, along with a few construction and architecture veterans.

The Deming Center Venture Fund of the University of Colorado Boulder contributed to the raise as did Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm founded by former Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt.

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