Construction is civilization's bottleneck. Everything from housing shortages to infrastructure decay flows downstream from how we build. Buildings, airports, hospitals, data centers, and bridges, the bedrock of our lives, often take years to move from idea to reality.

The construction industry in the West remains frozen in time, not because construction professionals lack skill or ambition, but because they deserve better tools. The tools haven't kept up with the imagination of those who build.

Our ability to design and construct is a fundamental lever of civilization's progress. How fast society can build determines its growth potential and resilience. That’s why our mission at Belidor is to accelerate the rate of construction and design 100x by creating the user-friendly intelligence layer for the built world.

Imagine saying, "We need a new building," and within days, all elements are prepped and ready to build. Designs confirmed. Materials procured. Labor ready to execute. A city recovering from disaster, a family outgrowing their home, a rapidly expanding business, all able to build what they need in days instead of years. Prompt-to-building is the science fiction future we need.

We named our company after Bernard Forest de Bélidor, an 18th-century engineer who transformed engineering from apprenticeship-based art into science. We see ourselves continuing that lineage, moving preconstruction from intuition-driven estimation to precision forecasting grounded in data and collective intelligence.

We begin by solving a crucial pain point every commercial General Contractor experiences: bid leveling.

Bid leveling is the process of comparing and choosing Subcontractors who have bid to work on a construction project based on their total bid price, the quality of work, and speed. It is often called both an art and a science. It's a data-heavy undertaking that can consume a mid-market preconstruction team for 4-5 full days every month. That's 25% of their time devoted to data entry and analysis.

Bid Day, the deadline day where a General Contractor submits their total package to an Owner, feels like firefighting: rushing to organize figures, constantly double-checking for mistakes. Belidor will transform this experience. The future looks like Estimators kicking their feet up while calling Subcontractors to validate bids. Less data entry, more human-to-human communication. They'll evolve from spreadsheet managers into data-driven negotiators who analyze real market signals, validate scopes, and win bids faster with less stress and greater accuracy.

Part of this plan is to capture the patterns and preferences that live in senior Estimators' heads. We'll equip every Estimator with collective intelligence from past projects, understanding price trends, qualifying Subcontractors, eliminating the anxiety of perfecting every spreadsheet cell. Most importantly, we're building software that works reliably and securely, so every Estimator benefits from the intelligence they create. Each firm grows smarter over time.

Bid leveling is the foundation. Every workflow we build next emerges from the intelligence captured before. This isn't a feature roadmap but a compounding system where each product makes the next one possible.

Scope Generation: Upload project specifications and plans, get complete trade-specific scopes that flow directly into bid leveling sheets and Invitation-to-Bid forms eliminating weeks of work.

Intelligent Invitation-to-Bid: Belidor learns which Subcontractors respond quickly, bid competitively, and perform well. Every ITB you send has a high probability of getting a serious response.

Subcontractor Tools: Lightweight tools that help trades evaluate projects faster and submit cleaner bids. We can also start resolving RFIs automatically, surfacing answers from historical data instantly.

Automatic Quantity Takeoffs: In our opinion, the hardest problem in preconstruction. We're building AI that outputs complete quantity estimates in seconds. Plans in, quantities out. And different trades measure differently, whereas MEP needs linear feet of conduit, concrete needs cubic yards and rebar tonnage. We'll go trade-by-trade, building a specialized understanding.

Each product builds on the previous one: bid leveling teaches us to read construction documents, scope generation teaches us how specs translate to bid packages, ITB intelligence reveals which relationships succeed, and automatic takeoffs become possible because we understand the full context.

We're building an intelligence moat that deepens with every step. By the end of this phase, we'll have the intelligence layer for preconstruction and a connected system that gets exponentially smarter with use.

With preconstruction running 100x faster, the next expansions become obvious:

The end state: "We need a hospital" becomes a complete design, accurate pricing, qualified Subcontractors, ordered materials, and an executable schedule, all within days, not months.

That's infrastructure abundance: construction moving at a speed necessary to support every corner of civilization.

Our team's ability to design and build AI-native software is unique in the construction tech industry. We bring humility, approaching every relationship with empathy to ensure we cobuild tools that address real pains while advancing our vision. Our product principles are:

Ease of use. Construction software should be intuitive and immediately useful. Any estimator or general contractor can sign up and quickly realize Belidor's value.

Transparency and Security. General Contractors should always know where their data comes from, how it's used, and that it's protected. One wrong number can cost millions. We take that responsibility seriously.

100x leverage. Every estimator, owner, or builder using Belidor should be exponentially faster, smarter, and more effective. The ultimate metric is winning more bids.

We're at the beginning of a journey to make construction 100x more efficient. We'll do it with humility, collaboration, and respect for the craft that built the world around us.

If you're a software engineer, general contractor, estimator, investor, or construction thought leader, and if this mission resonates, reach out. We'd love to talk.