AI-Assisted Construction-Bid Startup Fields $4M Seed Investment

A Philadelphia-based startup that uses a combination of foreign labor and artificial intelligence to help construction contractors submit more bids has closed its inaugural investment round. 

Guthrie AI raised $4M to help expand beyond its roster of 52 clients. The seed round investment was led by Chicago Ventures and included funds from York IE, MVP Capital Partners and Flybridge.

The startup, which focuses on estimation and other preconstruction processes, began by working with window glazing firms before broadening to other specialty contractors. 

“You can bid 70% more per person than you were previously doing,” Guthrie AI President Ted Baumgardner said of the value proposition offered by the platform he started building in 2024.

While the company is working on its expanding proprietary AI platform, he said the process today is only about 10% automated.

The other 90% of Guthrie AI’s services are carried out by its personnel, including about a dozen domestic workers and roughly 60 overseas employees in locales like India and the Philippines.

Guthrie AI clients each get their own personal bid assistant, a real person who helps them complete the arduous paperwork that often stands between a company and new business opportunities. Each assistant is dedicated to one client.

“This is not a pure software company, at least not yet,” Baumgardner said.

“You're not hiring just people. You're not buying just technology,” he added. “You're getting the combination of them to deliver the outcomes that are important.”

The new funds from the seed round, which closed June 30, will help Baumgardner hire more engineers, primarily in the U.S. Guthrie AI had six on its staff when the founder spoke to Bisnow earlier this month. His goal is to bump that up to 10 or 12.

The new hires will be tasked in part with expanding the degree to which the Guthrie AI platform is automated. 

“AI is very good with text,” Baumgardner said. “Understanding construction documents is the next level of spatial reasoning that the models just aren’t there with yet. … We need a human to go through and identify where the frames are.”

At present, the automated aspects of the process include identifying which parts of a bid are relevant to a client at the beginning and sending out correspondence once the bids are complete.

While Baumgardner declined to share exactly what percentage of Guthrie AI his investors now own, he confirmed that they are now equity partners. He remains the majority stakeholder.

The company has grown quickly. Baumgardner recalled that in the middle of last year, he didn’t have any engineers on his team.

His turn toward venture capital represented a pivot for Guthrie AI, which has been funded entirely by the company’s own cash flow for the past two years.

AI startups have become a hot target for VC firms as the technology has advanced in recent years. Several AI-focused proptech firms have raised money, such as the $270M investment Bedrock received from Alphabet, Nvidia and other partners.  

Baumgardner, a New Jersey native now living in Philadelphia, began working on Guthrie AI after earning an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. This followed his eight-year stint in the U.S. Marines as a ground intelligence officer.

The founder said he expects to deliver a return of between 30 and 300 times what his investors provided over the next seven to 10 years.

“The goal is to build a generational company that rethinks how construction is done. … They’re investing in the chance to build that future,” he said.

“People are not going to be buying software anymore. They’re going to be buying outcomes,” Baumgardner added. “The technology company is just going to do the work.”