About Quotr.ai

Hanyang Liu went on to study architecture, spent years as an architect at firms like TAO and SmithGroup. He lived at the handoff between design and construction, watching project after project get derailed the moment a beautiful design met a cost estimate. Manual construction takeoffs took weeks. Estimates were stale before they landed. Pro formas, quantities, and procurement all lived in disconnected silos, even though they were the same project. Junzhe Shi took a different path through AI and systems engineering, building algorithms at Apple and UC Berkeley to solve complex problems that were too slow to handle manually. Different careers, different industries — but when we reconnected around the same problem, it clicked immediately.

We started talking to builders, contractors, developers, and subs. Every conversation pointed to the same bottleneck: estimating and bidding are critical to winning work, but the process is manual, time-consuming, and hard to scale. Contractors spend days reviewing drawings, doing takeoffs, and preparing proposals — and the margin for error is razor thin. Bid too high, lose the project. Bid too low, lose the margin.

The technology had finally caught up to the problem. Computer vision could handle takeoff. AI could structure estimates and proposals. At that point, not building it felt like the riskier choice.

So we built Quotr.ai — an AI-powered estimating platform that takes construction teams from drawings to accurate estimates and proposals, faster. We're not bolting AI onto old workflows. We're rebuilding preconstruction around what AI can now do, so contractors can spend less time on the process and more time winning the right projects.