Revolutionary Design Data Management for Architects and Engineers

No matter what kind of business we run, they all require our full attention on various aspects, sometimes more than we count. After starting a business, which is a phase that already necessitates an array of details we have to run, like research or early funding, we need to manage staff, gain and satisfy customers, build infrastructure, and so on.

One aspect that may get overlooked due to the abundance of things we have to think about is organization. Whether in the sense of staff management, storage management, or data management, being and staying organized plays a massive part in our company’s day-to-day productivity and efficiency.

To set an example, imagine you’re an accountant for a business and need to conduct an annual review, but all the financial statements, documents, and reports your company’s teams have given you are scattered. You have to sort through papers or servers if you’ve gone digital, but the mess has made it impossible for you to find anything.

Some firms in various industries still face the issue of disorganization, one of them being firms in the construction design industry. Architectural and engineering firms often experience the lack of an effective system for organizing past designs that often need repurposing. This has led to professionals in the field constantly trying to find a solution. This is what Pirros, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded by Ari Baranian and Peter Johann, is trying to achieve.

Detailed Design Blueprints

Every time we leave our houses, we see buildings with unique exteriors, but most of them share similar basic structures. This is because construction design companies often go with the same detailing conditions that they already know work. These details, which can be a wall assembly or a connection between a beam and a column, have become a blueprint for construction that will most definitely be recreated for a construction design team’s next project.

Every project, no matter the size of the building, would require at least 100s of these “basic” details, so we can imagine the enormous amount of work architects and engineers would have to go through if they had to redraw and redesign them every single time.

This scenario is, in fact, an issue plenty of these teams have to face every day. For many construction design companies, design information is often stored on on-premises servers, meaning servers hosted on-site that companies would have to manage and maintain on their own.

These servers, which can be in the form of hardware or software applications, have proved to be an inefficient management system, as most, if not all, of them make it difficult for construction designers to access and repurpose past detail designs.

This warrants architects and engineers to waste their time digging through past projects and unorganized file servers to search for those details, like searching for a needle in a haystack.

In some cases, firms have to discard design details because their servers either have no space to store them or simply do not have the ability to rediscover them. This leads to redundancy, as now the construction designer teams would have to recreate every drawing for every new project, wasting their time and also risking the quality control that was once already achieved when creating the initial designs.

What Pirros has managed to do is create a platform designed to store all of a company’s previous blueprint projects in a single cloud-based location, essentially streamlining drawing sets for buildings and infrastructure.

Centralized, Searchable Design Hub

Pirros’ goal is to allow architects and engineers to utilize their precious time wisely and actually design buildings instead of documenting them, which takes a lot of time and requires tons of effort, an effort that may not actually be part of their job description. The startup’s platform lets companies easily and quickly reference all their previous work, so there would be no need to design the same detail twice.

Pirros’ platform enables architects and engineers to access past details by simply searching for and filtering them based on specific categories and catalogs, whether by their project name or number, code cycles, risk factors, floor systems, or even by the detail’s location in a building.

Pirros utilizes AI to extract data from building information models, or BIMs*. The startup indexes the collected data and turns them into what has become its software’s reusable catalog of 2D assets, managing to expand its catalog to over 10,000 details. Aside from the colossal catalog, clustering algorithms were used to develop the software, allowing users to see similar details of different versions and choose the best one to use.

*BIM: A model used for planning, design, construction, and operation to help architects, engineers, and constructors visualize what is to be built in a simulated environment and identify potential issues.

Pirros’ platform is integrated into Revit and any of their client’s firm’s tools and workflows. Firms can easily pick and choose whichever model they want to be included in their Pirros catalog with the integration process done by Pirros.

With this system, the massive amount of drawing sets that have been created for buildings and infrastructure over the years can be found with a simple search, just like your regular, everyday Google search session.

Customer Satisfaction

Recently, Pirros raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of angel investors and advisors deeply embedded in the construction design industry. This includes former chief executive of AutoDesk Carl Bass, HelloSign’s Joseph Walla, and PlanGrid’s Ryan Sutton-Gee. A few venture capital firms also participated in the funding, including YCombinator, FundersClub, and Twenty-Two Ventures.

Pirros has proven to be a pioneer in the field of design detail management, as it received plenty of traction from young architects and engineers as well as established companies in the industry, such as KPFF Engineers and RAMSA.

To create an even more significant impact, Pirros will be using its collected funds to expand its market and grow its team. The startup also plans to improve its product further, one way by using AI to identify and recommend the best details for companies based on their needs and requirements.

With its co-founders’ vision of creating a product the way they would have wanted as users, there is no doubt that Pirros will continue to refine and thrive.

Meme & AI-Generated Picture

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