Bobyard.

It is a Tuesday and an estimator is squinting at a drywall plan, clicking every door symbol, tallying every linear foot of edge, because a wrong number means a lost bid or a job that loses money. This is the takeoff - the unglamorous arithmetic underneath every building that has ever gone up. It is slow, it is thankless, and until recently it was stubbornly human.

Bobyard's whole proposition is that a computer can do the counting. Its models read the plan, detect the symbols, measure the areas and the lengths, and hand the estimator a structured pile of numbers in minutes. The human still makes the call. The machine just stops asking them to be a calculator.

It sounds modest. It is not. Construction is one of the largest industries on earth and one of the least digitized, and the takeoff sits at the exact choke point between "we could bid this" and "we don't have time." Remove the bottleneck and a four-person shop suddenly bids like a forty-person one.

Michael Ding did not arrive at construction the way most software founders do - from the outside, holding a deck. He got a California general contractor's license as a teenager, partly out of curiosity, partly to actually understand how the industry works. The problem found him later, through his own remodeling projects, where the estimating felt absurdly manual for the year it was happening in.

Ding is a Stanford-trained engineer and an award-winning mathematician, which is a useful combination when the product you want to build is, at its core, computer vision pointed at a wall of blueprints. Bobyard went through Pear VC's PearX accelerator in the summer of 2023, raised a $3.5M seed that December, and started somewhere unexpected: landscaping.

Landscaping was a deliberate choice, not a default. It is among the least-digitized trades in construction - few tools, lots of manual measurement, a wide-open lane. Win the trade nobody else wanted, prove the model, then move outward.

The estimator squinting at the drywall plan is still there. But now the door symbols are already counted, the edges already measured, the quantities already stacked in a column waiting for a markup. The long night got short. The four-person shop sent out three bids instead of one, and won the one it would have missed.

That is the entire point of Bobyard, and it is a quiet one. It does not replace the estimator's judgment about what a job is worth. It just refuses to make a skilled person spend their afternoon being a tally counter. The world still gets built by people - Bobyard simply hands them back the hours that the highlighter used to steal.