In the construction industry, the preconstruction process accounts for a considerable portion of time, costs and potential errors. Among these stages, “bid leveling”, comparing subcontractor offers for the same project, remains one of the most persistent bottlenecks. Each month, entire teams of general contractors spend up to a full week to harmonize disparate quotes, align cost lines and check technical consistencies.
It is precisely this time-consuming task that the young company Belidor wants to automate. Founded six months ago, the startup has developed an artificial intelligence platform capable of transforming hundreds of heterogeneous documents (quotes, plans, cost sheets) into structured and comparable data. The objective is to reduce a week’s work to a few hours, without losing the precision of the analyses.
“The knowledge of the site lives in the heads of the site managers. We want to make it accessible, usable and transferable to each team,” explain the founders of the startup. The tool is based on a so-called “native” AI, designed from the outset for the construction industry, which learns from previous projects in order to continually improve the quality of comparisons and the relevance of decisions.
Beyond this first use case, the company aims to extend its approach to all preconstruction. Its concept of “prompt-to-building” illustrates this vision which is to allow an organization to formulate a need, a new building, an extension, a reconstruction, and to see in a few days the plans validated, the materials identified and the teams ready to build. An idea that is still distant, but which reflects a profound change in the construction value chain, which has long remained resistant to digital productivity.
Belidor announces that it has raised $3.1 million, or approximately €2.64 million, during a pre-seed round led by Angular Ventures and Max Ventures, with the participation of Entrepreneurs First, Transpose Platform and several business angels, including Playfair Capital. The company, led by Marc Anthony Apicella and his co-founder, is now developing its technical team in Paris and targeting the American general contracting market, from Utah to New York.
