Quotr AI Raised $4M to Fix the Slowest Part of Construction
Today we’re sharing some news: Quotr AI has raised a $4 million seed round, led by Llama Ventures, with a group of strategic angels alongside them.
We could open with the number and the logos. But the number isn’t the point — it’s the fuel. So let me start with what it’s for.
The part of construction nobody wants to do
Ask a contractor where a project really goes wrong and almost nobody says “we built it wrong.” They say the bid was off. Someone priced the job on incomplete information, a scope fell between two trades, the material numbers were three months stale — and by the time anyone noticed, it was a change order in the field or a renegotiated contract at the table.
The bid is the foundation of the whole project. It sets the scope, the budget, and the timeline before a shovel moves. Get it right and everything downstream is easier. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the job paying for it.
And yet preconstruction — the takeoffs, the estimates, the bid itself — is still the slowest, most manual part of the business. Before an estimator can price anything, they spend hours measuring drawings and counting symbols by hand. It’s nights and weekends. It’s the reason a good contractor turns down work they’d probably win: not because their numbers are wrong, but because they can’t get to the number in time.
That’s the part we set out to fix.
Where we started
Quotr started in 2024 at UC Berkeley, out of Batch 19 at Berkeley SkyDeck, the university’s accelerator. We began with a simple, stubborn belief: the estimate isn’t just a document you produce to win work. It’s the commercial operating system for the entire project. Every decision that follows — every buyout, every schedule, every change order — traces back to it. If that first number is fast, accurate, and something both sides can actually see into, the whole project runs better.
So we built the platform we wished contractors had. You upload a PDF or image plan set, and our AI reads it — counting quantities, measuring lengths, calculating areas across every sheet, in metric or imperial. From there it builds a priced estimate and a client-ready proposal, and you can ask the drawings questions in plain language and trace any number straight back to the sheet it came from. For teams that are short on capacity, our estimating desk pairs that AI with in-house estimators and delivers the finished takeoffs and estimates for you, in days.
What’s happened since
We’ve been quietly in production the whole time — with developers, general contractors, and subcontractors, across residential, multifamily, and commercial work. A few numbers from that stretch:
- Contractors using Quotr have cut takeoff time by up to 80% — from roughly 20 hours down to one or two.
- Bid turnaround has gone from days to hours, and customers tell us they’re submitting 40% more bids a month.
- The estimates we’ve supported now add up to over $1.2 billion in cumulative construction value. That last number is the one that made us stop and take stock. It means the tool is holding up on real jobs, at real stakes — which is exactly when an estimate has to be right.
What the $4M is for
This round lets us do three things: expand our enterprise deployments, grow the supplier network behind our procurement layer, and scale the platform to every contractor who wants it.
One place we’re leaning in: the hard, high-stakes end of the market. U.S. data-center construction is projected to grow at nearly 9% a year through 2031, and those builds are brutal to estimate — 20-plus trade categories, committed equipment and specialized labor locked in before construction even starts, and scope errors that cost more than almost anywhere else. That complexity is exactly where fast, traceable, all-trade takeoff earns its keep, and it’s where we’re heading next: heavy industrial and mission-critical work.
Come find us
We’ll be out at a lot of the industry’s tables this fall — the NECA Convention & Trade Show, the ULI Fall Meeting, and Chicago Build Expo in October, and Phoenix Build Expo in December. If you’re an estimator, a GC, or a developer who’s tired of losing weekends to takeoffs, come say hello. Bring your hardest plan set — that’s the honest test.
Thank you
To Llama Ventures and the angels who backed us before this was obvious — thank you for seeing it early. To Berkeley SkyDeck for the launchpad. And most of all to the contractors who let us into their bid process and told us, plainly, what was broken. This round is really yours; we just get to keep building it.
The estimate is where projects are won or lost. We’re going to make it the best part of the job instead of the worst.
See a product demo → · Talk to our team →
About Quotr.ai
Quotr is an AI-native estimating and procurement platform that automates quantity takeoff, cost estimation, proposal generation, and material procurement for contractors — with a done-for-you estimating desk for teams that would rather hand it off. Founded in 2024 out of Berkeley SkyDeck and a product of FLOZ Inc., Quotr supports estimating workflows across residential, multifamily, and commercial construction.
Published on the Quotr.ai blog.
