Guthrie AI Raises $4 Million Seed Round Led by Chicago Ventures to Put a Virtual Bid Assistant on Every Glazing Team

Guthrie AI recruits and trains Virtual Bid Assistants that glazing contractors hire directly; 52 already placed nationwide; new funding will grow the platform that makes it possible

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Guthrie AI:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Guthrie AI has raised a $4 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures to grow its platform for recruiting, training, and hiring Virtual Bid Assistants for glazing contractors (video).
• Virtual Bid Assistants act like the “nurse” to an Estimator (the doctor) – preparing the information, assisting getting quotes back on time, and making sure the proposal is fully covered.
• 52 glaziers and vendors have already hired a Guthrie AI Virtual Bid Assistant, cutting bid turnaround from weeks to days, bidding 70% more without adding staff.
• The funding will expand Guthrie AI's engineering team and deepen integrations with tools estimators already use, including Bluebeam, Outlook, and Excel.

THE STORY

There's never enough time. That's the first thing you hear from every glazing estimator in the country. Not enough time for takeoffs. Not enough time to get pricing before the deadline. Not enough time to fix drawings that make no sense.

Everyone knows that things have been moving in the wrong direction. GCs want more scope breakouts, more rounds of numbers, and more rounds of budgeting before they actually buy out the job. Margins have been getting smaller, and the amount of risk glaziers have to carry has become unsustainable.

The obvious fix is to hire help. In practice, that's hard – there just aren’t enough people entering the industry. Trusting someone new is even harder. And even once you find the right person, integrating them to work the way your team works takes many months.

Guthrie AI already did the hard part. They recruited and trained Virtual Bid Assistants and built the platform that makes it easy to hire one, supervise them, and get them working your way from day one. With a Guthrie AI VBA, glazing contractors can bid 70% more with their current staff, meaning they can keep up with everything the GCs throw their way.

BACKGROUND

Ted Baumgardner is a Marine Intel Officer turned Glazing Estimator who suffered this pain himself. He then started using the structured analytic techniques he learned in the Marines to organize bid invites so that he could learn jobs faster and spend more time with his clients building relationships and winning work. This bought him so much time back that he turned it into a platform for other glaziers. After two years of piloting with a number of industry partners, they are now opening Guthrie AI to the broader market.

"We’re not building a self-driving car. Not yet. There’s still a person behind the wheel, a real “VBA” who knows how to do a takeoff and price a job the way you need. What we built is the app that makes it easy to hire that person, train them, and work with them every day. Uber never built a car. What they built was the app that makes it easy to find a driver. That’s what we’re doing for glazing contractors," said Ted Baumgardner, founder and President of Guthrie AI.

THE ROUND

The round will fund an expanded engineering team and continued growth of Guthrie AI's Virtual Bid Assistant program, which has already placed trained assistants with 52 glaziers and vendors nationwide, helping them speed up bidding and cut back on the administrative work that eats into an estimator's day.

Rob Chesney, General Partner at Chicago Ventures, knows how important the trade specific knowledge is: "The hardest thing to find in construction tech is a founder who has actually lived the problem. Ted grew up doing takeoffs in his family's glass business before serving as a Marine intelligence officer. He knows this trade from the inside and has a tenacious, competitive spirit. If anyone has what it takes to build the complex automations required to support glaziers or the construction trades broadly, we believe it’s going to be Ted.”

Q&A FOR CONTEXT

What does it mean to hire a bid assistant through Guthrie AI?

Estimating used to be an individual sport. The way you learned the job was to count every frame yourself. But the pace of the industry has increased to the point where this is no longer feasible. Enter Virtual Bid Assistants who enable estimators the same way a nurse enables a doctor. The VBAs automatically download and organize files, identify the scope, and prepare quote requests.

By the time the estimator gets into the job, they now have a road map to follow and time to get into the details to understand what exactly the architect is trying to accomplish.

What does AI do in the platform?

Think of our technology as creating the instructions and the route for the VBA and translating those outputs into something that is usable. Anyone who’s been in the industry knows that it takes more time to delegate something than it does to do it yourself, because of all the time it takes to explain the tasks that need to be done. That’s what our AI layer can do automatically – ingest a bid invite, automatically identify the scope, and route it to a client’s VBA to make sure that pricing goes out to vendors on time.

“We realized that a lot of estimator time was getting eaten up just transferring data from Bluebeam to Excel to email or other platforms. We’ve built the connectors so that once information is in Bluebeam, it is automatically transferred to the formats that our clients need it in,” said Tuneer De, co-founder and Head of Product at Guthrie AI.