Founder & CEO · AIMHI
Cherryanne Angoy
She left 16 years in American tech to build an AI construction app for the one place AI usually quits - the spot where the cell signal drops.
Cherryanne Lee Angoy. Tagumenya. Builder of builders.
She left 16 years in American tech to build an AI construction app for the one place AI usually quits - the spot where the cell signal drops.
Cherryanne Lee Angoy. Tagumenya. Builder of builders.
Picture a construction site at the end of a long dirt road in Davao. The concrete is poured, the crew is logging hours, somebody needs more rebar by Thursday. And there is no internet. For most software, that is the end of the story. For Cherryanne Lee Angoy, it was the beginning of one.
Angoy is the founder and CEO of AIMHI - short for AI Meets Human Intelligence - a women-led startup that builds project-management software for contractors. The flagship product, the AIMHI Builder Suite, watches a project the way a sharp site engineer would: tracking costs, flagging delays before they snowball, nudging when a material is about to run short. The twist is that it keeps working when the connection does not. Record offline, sync when signal returns. On a Philippine job site, that is not a feature. It is the whole point.
Nine of ten construction projects run late, over budget, or both. AIMHI's pitch is blunt: give small and mid-sized contractors the same predictive muscle the big firms buy, at a price a Pinoy builder can actually pay.
AI is meant to aid. It's not meant to replace the estimator.- Cherryanne Angoy
For about sixteen years, Angoy's career lived inside American telecom. She held leadership roles at Verizon, moving across digital marketing, sales, and operations - the kind of resume that usually keeps a person comfortably stateside.
She came home instead. Back in the Philippines she co-founded an ecommerce venture called StreetBy, her first turn as a builder rather than an operator inside someone else's machine. The ambition underneath all of it was geographic as much as commercial: advance the economy of Mindanao, and do it in construction - a field where few women run the show.
In May 2021 she teamed up with Monica Llamas-Turrecha to start AIMHI. Atty. Ma. Janice Tejano joined the next year to run legal and data privacy. Three founders, each with a different weapon - technology, governance, construction - pointed at the same target.
They did not start by writing code. They started by listening. Contractors, engineers, and architects kept naming the same villain: connectivity. So the team built for the gap, not around it.
Sixteen years in US tech, including leadership roles at Verizon across marketing, sales, and operations.
Returns to the Philippines; co-founds ecommerce startup StreetBy.
Co-founds AIMHI with Monica Llamas-Turrecha to bring AI to construction.
Wins 500K AWS credits after impressing a speaker at an UPGRADE mentoring session; featured on Davao's Byaheng Du30.
Raises P4.3M (P3.8M from DOST-PCIEERD, the rest from Accenture); joins UP Diliman's UPSCALE Innovation Hub.
Wins the E3 Chairman Recognition Award in Kuala Lumpur.
Named Startup of the Year; deepens local AI talent work with DOST-PCIEERD.
Launches the Builder Suite mobile app with offline mode for low-connectivity sites.
Log progress, attendance, and material requests with no bars on the phone. The data waits patiently and syncs the moment signal returns.
Alerts surface looming delays, material shortages, and budget concerns - the small cracks that become expensive if nobody catches them early.
Real-time cost tracking and actionable recommendations aimed at the contractor's oldest tension: hit the spec and still make the margin.
The promise is plain-spoken. Angoy describes AIMHI as more than a schedule organizer, cost tracker, or inventory manager - software that ensures profit increase by handing builders insight instead of paperwork.
We finally launched our mobile app with offline mode - take it with you anywhere on a job site in the Philippines.- Cherryanne Angoy, on the 2025 launch
The DOST grant came on the third application. That detail tells you more than any tagline: two rejections, a stack of feedback, and a founder who treated each no as a syllabus. The AWS credits arrived the same way - not from a pitch deck, but from genuinely impressing someone in a mentoring room.
There is a quiet geography to her ambition. Plenty of Filipino tech talent orbits Manila or stays abroad. Angoy planted the company in Tagum City and talks about building Mindanao into an AI hub for Asia - a sentence that sounds outsized until you remember she has already pulled grants, awards, and an international investor toward Davao.
The plan: cover the Philippines first, then look outward to Southeast Asia. The price points - a Builder Suite measured in single-digit thousands of pesos a year, power tools at ₱250 a month - are the strategy made literal. Advanced tools, in the hands of the small contractor who never had them.
Cherryanne sat down for the Start Up Podcast PH to walk through AIMHI - the offline bet, the grants, and the long road back to Mindanao.
Further reading: Mindanao Times · BusinessWorld · SunStar Davao · Upgrade Innolab