A building has several authors, and they do not always agree. The disagreement can be small enough to fit inside a drawing symbol and consequential enough to stop work. Alexander Michalatos has spent much of his career on different sides of that conversation: designing, subcontracting, managing construction, and working in real estate development. Eventually, he helped start a company to read the conversation itself.
Buildcheck, where he is co-founder and CEO, reviews construction drawings with computer vision. It looks for the omissions and inconsistencies that are easy to overlook when one project arrives as hundreds of separate sheets. The premise has a certain dry appeal. Before anyone pours concrete, it would be useful if the documents had finished arguing.
Michalatos came to that problem through construction rather than through an abstract search for something to automate. A Vancouver native, he grew up around his father’s residential building business. Years later, his work would take him through engineering, major project delivery, a Fulbright award, and Stanford. The recurring subject was how people turn information into a building.
A father who could see the whole job
His father supplied the early example. In Michalatos’s telling, he moved from a village in Kefalonia to Canada as a teenager, worked in several businesses, and settled into construction. His son remembers someone who could move between design details, financing, building systems, and physical work. The attraction was the breadth of responsibility.
“My inspiration for work has always been my dad.”
Alexander Michalatos
The childhood lesson was practical: a building required someone to understand how the pieces belonged together. His later career put him inside projects where that understanding had to be shared among many specialists. A family building business and a large construction project could hardly operate the same way, but both needed their participants to agree about what they were making.
An engineer changes seats
At the University of British Columbia, Michalatos studied mechanical engineering. He graduated in 2017 and received the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering Gold Medal for academic achievement and leadership. That combination is relevant to the work that followed: knowing how a system functions and helping the people responsible for it work together are related tasks, but they require different skills.
His professional route included Stantec, where he worked as an industrial designer on public-private partnership projects; Honeywell, where he worked in project management; EllisDon, where he managed mechanical and electrical scopes; and QuadReal, where he worked in real estate development. Each position offered a different view of the decisions that shape a project.
The designer has to make an intention legible. The subcontractor has to deliver a defined scope. The general contractor has to coordinate work across trades. The developer has to consider the project as an investment and a place that will be used. Those descriptions simplify complicated jobs, but they explain why changing seats can reveal problems that stay hidden from one position.
Michalatos also advised on construction technology for the Ellinikon redevelopment in Greece, a project on the Athenian Riviera. The assignment extended his experience beyond Canadian project delivery. His route into software already included the practical question a technology supplier eventually faces: how does a proposed tool fit into the organization that must use it?
Buildcheck founded
The classroom, in reverse
In 2021, he received a Canadian Fulbright student award to attend Stanford. His listed research interest concerned private-sector infrastructure investment in public-private partnership procurement. Even before Buildcheck, the question was larger than an individual component: how to organize the money, responsibilities, and decisions needed to deliver infrastructure.
He completed his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2023. He also served as co-president of its Future of Cities Club. Construction remained a subject to work on during business school, with courses connecting real estate, infrastructure finance, development, and entrepreneurship.
Buildcheck was co-founded in 2023 with Andrei Molchynsky and Alex Gureiev. Molchynsky brought experience in law, investment, and development; Gureiev brought enterprise software experience. The three were Stanford MBA classmates. Their backgrounds gave the young company access to several kinds of expertise that its product would need to bring together.
A Stanford Student Impact Fund grant of $6,000 helped the team build and test a proof of concept. The fund’s later account connects that prototype to early pilot customers and venture funding. It also records a September 2024 product release. The sequence gives the founding story useful proportions: first make a working version, then find people willing to use it.
In 2025, Michalatos returned to Stanford’s CEE 246P, Opportunities in PropTech and ConTech, to give a guest lecture. He had taken the class during Buildcheck’s beginnings. Now he was discussing those beginnings with another group of students. He described the invitation as a personal milestone, connecting the classroom to his father’s roots in a small Greek village.
There is a pleasing change of perspective in returning to a course with a company to explain. The earlier questions have acquired customers, colleagues, and consequences. He could talk about the route from a construction problem to a business while remembering what it felt like to sit on the other side of the room.
Teaching a computer to look
Michalatos’s argument about construction AI starts with the documents. Buildings are described through drawings as well as words. A reviewer needs to interpret geometry, symbols, dimensions, and the relationships between components. A system that processes the text on a sheet still has a great deal of the sheet left to understand.
Consider a pipe and a column shown in the same space. Reading their labels does not resolve their relationship. Or consider an electrical component that appears differently across two drawings. The issue can exist between individually plausible documents. Finding it requires comparison and context, including an understanding of what each discipline is trying to communicate.
Buildcheck works with the two-dimensional PDFs project teams already have. Its checks cover missing information, coordination conflicts, and differences between specifications and drawings. Human reviewers validate the AI findings before they reach customers. That final step matters to a construction team: a list of possible problems becomes useful when people can decide which ones deserve attention.
His emphasis on specialized training also offers a practical question for anyone buying AI software. What was the system trained to recognize? Construction drawings differ between firms and disciplines. A convincing description of artificial intelligence still has to survive contact with the drawing set on someone’s desk.
The distinction between a review and a revision is especially relevant here. Identifying an inconsistency creates a question for the project team. Someone still has to decide what should change, communicate that decision, and check that the next set reflects it. Software that helps with revisions therefore follows the same coordination problem beyond its first discovery. For a former construction manager, the appeal is easy to understand.
The work also rewards restraint. A reviewer needs enough detail to act, and the people receiving a comment need to know which part of their work it concerns. Speed matters, but a useful result must fit the practical habits of the people opening the drawings the following morning.
A business measured in drawing sets
By September 2026, Buildcheck reported more than 110 paying customers and over 150,000 drawings reviewed. Its named customers included EllisDon, an earlier employer of Michalatos, as well as DPR Construction and Power Construction. Those figures describe the company’s reported activity. They also show the distance from a classroom prototype to a tool used by established project teams.
The company announced a $12 million Series A that month, led by Telescope Partners, with participation from DPR’s venture arm, WND Ventures. A construction customer was also becoming a financial backer. Funding does not answer every question about a product, but it provides resources for the next stage of development.
The scope of the product was expanding too. Diffs compares drawing revisions; Custom Checks applies a contractor’s own review standards. Plangrep joined Buildcheck in August 2026, adding technology and expertise for extracting structured information from drawings. Each addition addresses another part of the work surrounding the initial review.
Michalatos’s own recognition included a 2026 Site Service Awards finalist selection and a place in On-Site Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40. The professional honors sit alongside the business milestones. His more revealing public advice, however, concerns how to behave toward the people doing the work.
Ask the person holding the other drawing
He advises people to learn by doing, ask questions, and understand their colleagues’ strengths and objectives. He cautions against assuming that designers do not understand site work or that contractors are simply hunting for change orders. “Construction is a team sport,” he says. Having occupied several positions on that team gives the advice some substance.
There are smaller details too. He lists renting sunbeds on a beach as his first job. In a January 2025 LinkedIn post, he admitted he was already four weeks behind on a resolution to be more active there. A person helping computers inspect drawings can still find a posting schedule difficult to coordinate.
His ambitions remain attached to construction professionals and the work they must organize. The career that led him to Buildcheck offers a consistent reason for that focus: he has seen projects from enough positions to know that no participant holds every answer. Somewhere, another person is looking at another sheet. Helping them notice the disagreement sooner is a useful place to begin.