Ari Baranian

A Teams channel, a thousand redundant drawings, and one stubborn idea

At the engineering firm where Ari Baranian used to work, there was a Microsoft Teams channel that existed for exactly one purpose: to ask the rest of the office whether anyone had ever drawn a particular thing before. A beam-to-column connection. A waterproofing detail at a parapet. A condition that, somewhere in the firm's history, someone had almost certainly already solved.

Most of the time the answer was yes. And most of the time, it didn't matter, because nobody could find it. So the engineer drew it again. Across a single office, the same condition might exist in dozens of slightly different versions, each one drawn from scratch, each one a fresh chance to introduce an error. Baranian looked at that channel and saw something other people had stopped seeing: a problem hiding in plain sight, repeated millions of times a year across an entire industry.

That observation became Pirros, the company he co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO. Pirros is a detail management platform for architects and structural engineers. It plugs into Revit - the software almost every design firm uses to produce its drawings - and automatically pulls out every construction detail along with the metadata that describes it. The result is a searchable, cloud-based library of a firm's own accumulated work. Instead of asking a Teams channel, an engineer can just search.

Where he is pointing it

Baranian is not subtle about the destination. The pitch he keeps returning to is almost utopian for a profession that still measures documentation in months. He wants the drawing set to assemble itself from things the firm already knows how to build.

It is a big claim, and the interesting part is that the market seems to be agreeing with it. Pirros reports more than 300 firms on the platform, roughly $6M in annual recurring revenue, and - the line that makes investors sit up - profitability. The company says it grows revenue at about 10% month over month and holds net revenue retention around 120%, meaning customers tend to spend more the longer they stay. In 2025 it closed a Series A reported in the $15-17M range, after going through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and raising a $2M seed before that.

Those numbers matter more than they would in most software categories, because nobody expects them here. Architecture and engineering tools are supposed to be a slow, skeptical, low-margin business. A profitable, fast-growing vertical SaaS company aimed at structural engineers is close to a contradiction in terms. The fact that Pirros is one is the clearest evidence that Baranian found a real wound rather than a vitamin - firms are not buying the software because it is clever, they are buying it because the alternative is paying senior engineers to redraw work the firm already owns.

What the software actually does

Strip away the pitch and the mechanics are almost mundane, which is part of the point. When a firm produces a drawing set in Revit, Pirros reads it, identifies the individual details, and pulls each one out along with its metadata - what it is, what project it came from, how it was tagged. Those details land in a centralized cloud library that anyone at the firm can search and filter. When an engineer needs a connection they know has been solved before, they find it and pull it straight back into their current model instead of starting with a blank sheet.

The compounding effect is the real product. Every project a firm completes makes the library more valuable, because it adds more vetted, real-world details to draw from. A practice that has been operating for thirty years is sitting on an enormous, invisible asset - decades of solved problems - that has historically been locked inside old files and the memories of whoever happened to draw them. Pirros turns that latent history into something you can query. It is less a drawing tool than a memory system for the firm.

An engineer first, a founder second

The reason Pirros reads as credible to skeptical engineers is that Baranian is one of them. He grew up in an engineering family - his father ran a structural engineering business - and studied civil engineering at the University of Michigan before earning a master's in structural engineering from UC Berkeley. He is a real structural engineer, not a software person who discovered construction from the outside.

But he also taught himself to program, and that combination is the whole story. At KPFF Consulting Engineers, where he worked as a structural project engineer from 2020 to 2022, he didn't just design buildings. He founded the firm's Software Development Group, building internal tools to automate the repetitive design problems engineers kept running into. Pirros is what happened when he realized one of those internal tools deserved to be its own company - and that the problem wasn't specific to his office. It was everywhere.

There is an earlier data point too. Before any of the engineering jobs, Baranian started Modec Designs, an e-commerce business he scaled to $100,000 in revenue within ten months. So the founder instinct was there long before the structural-engineering credentials caught up to it.

Selling to a profession that runs on habit

Construction and design are notoriously hard places to sell software. The work is high-stakes, the liability is real, and the people doing it have spent decades building intuition. Baranian is clear-eyed about that resistance - he sees it as a feature of the industry's seriousness, not a flaw to be steamrolled.

That is exactly why Pirros works the way it does. It doesn't ask an engineer to change how they draw. It sits inside Revit, the tool they already live in, and quietly makes their past work reusable. The company is sometimes described as "GitHub for construction" - version control and shared knowledge for an industry that historically threw its institutional memory away every time a project closed out.

Y Combinator and the speed of being surrounded

Pirros went through Y Combinator in early 2023, and Baranian credits the experience less for the money than for the company it forced him to keep.

He runs the company alongside co-founder Peter Johann, a fellow former structural engineer based in Los Angeles, who serves as COO. The two split the classic founder roles, and the team has grown to dozens of employees backed by investors including Y Combinator, Elephant, FundersClub, and PlanGrid.

The man behind the catalog

For someone building infrastructure for an entire profession, Baranian keeps his quirks refreshingly small. His guilty pleasure is Nashville hot chicken from Howlin' Ray's in Los Angeles. He admits, with the honesty of someone who knows it's a flaw, that he tends to play a song on repeat until he's completely sick of it, then abandons it for the next one. It is, if you think about it, a very engineer way to consume music: run it until it fails, then move on.

The throughline is consistency. The kid who grew up around structural drawings, the student who learned to code on the side, the engineer who built tools nobody asked him to build, the founder selling reuse to an industry that loves starting over - they are all the same person, optimizing the same thing. Pirros is just the largest version of it so far.