Construction drawings quietly go out with lots of errors: dimension conflicts, co-ordination gaps, material mismatches, missing details and more. These errors turn into delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars of rework during construction. InspectMind reviews the full drawing set of a construction project in minutes. It cross-checks architecture, engineering, and specifications to catch issues that cause rework before building begins.
Here’s a video with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvn1FyHRlLQ.
Before this, I (Aakash) built an engineering firm that worked on ~10,000 buildings across the US. One thing that always frustrated us: a lot of design coordination issues don’t show up until construction starts. By then, the cost of a mistake can be 10–100x higher, and everyone is scrambling to fix problems that could have been caught earlier.
We tried everything including checklists, overlay reviews, peer checks but scrolling through 500–2000 PDF sheets and remembering how every detail connects to every other sheet is a brittle process. City reviewers and GC pre-con teams try to catch issues too, yet they still sneak through.
We thought: if models can parse code and generate working software, maybe they can also help reason about the built environment on paper. So we built something we wished we had!
You upload drawings and specs (PDFs). The system breaks them into disciplines and detail hierarchies, parses geometry and text, and looks for inconsistencies: - Dimensions that don’t reconcile across sheets; - Clearances blocked by mechanical/architectural elements; - Fire/safety details missing or mismatched; - Spec requirements that never made it into drawings; - Callouts referencing details that don’t exist.
The output is a list of potential issues with sheet refs and locations for a human to review. We don’t expect automation to replace design judgment, just to help ACE professionals not miss the obvious stuff. Current AIs are good at obvious stuff, plus can process data at quantities way beyond what humans can accurately do, so this is a good application for them.
Construction drawings aren't standardized and every firm names things differently. Earlier “automated checking” tools relied heavily on manually-written rules per customer, and break when naming conventions change. Instead, we’re using multimodal models for OCR + vector geometry, callout graphs across the entire set, constraint-based spatial checks, and retrieval-augmented code interpretation. No more hard-coded rules!
We’re processing residential, commercial, and industrial projects today. Latency ranges from minutes to a few hours depending on sheet count. There’s no onboarding required, simply upload PDFs. There are still lots of edge cases (PDF extraction weirdness, inconsistent layering, industry jargon), so we’re learning a lot from failures, maybe more than successes. But the tech is already delivering results that couldn’t be done with previous tools.
Pricing is pay-as-you-go: we give an instant online quote per project after you upload the project drawings. It’s hard to do regular SaaS pricing since one project may be a home remodel and another may be a highrise. We’re open to feedback on that too, we’re still figuring it out.
If you work with drawings as an architect, engineer, MEP, GC preconstruction, real estate developer, plan reviewer we’d love a chance to run a sample set and hear what breaks, what’s useful, and what’s missing!
We’ll be here all day to go into technical details about geometry parsing, clustering failures, code reasoning attempts or real-world construction stories about how things go wrong. Thanks for reading! We’re happy to answer anything and look forward to your comments!
Do you check anything like cross discipline coordination (e.g. online searching specification data for parts on drawings like mechanical units and detecting mismatch with electrical spec), or it wholly within 1 trades code at a time?
edit: there's info that answers this on the website. It seems limited to the common ones (e.g. elec vs arch), which makes sense.
Our approach mixes OCR, vector geometry, and learned embeddings so the model can recognize a symbol plus its surrounding annotations (e.g., “6-15R,” “DIM,” “GFCI”).
When symbols differ by drafter, the system leans heavily on the textual/graph context so it still resolves meaning accurately. We’re actively expanding our electrical symbol library and would love sample sets from your workflow.
One big issue Ive had is drafters use the same symbol for different things per person. One person's GFCi is another's switched receptacle. People use the specialty putlet symbol sometimes very precisely and others not. Often accompanied by an annotation (e.g. 6-15R).
Dimmers being ambiguous is huge; avoiding dimming type mismatches is basically 80% the lutron value add.
Compliance is a space we've branched into recently. Would be super interested in seeing how you guys are currently approaching symbol detection.
The location + occupancy/use type tells us the governing code families (e.g., IBC/IRC, ADA, NFPA, local amendments), and then we parse the sheets for callouts, annotations, assemblies, and spec sections to map them to the relevant provisions.
So the system knows when to check (e.g., plumbing fixture clearances) because of the objects it detects in the drawings, and it knows what code to check based on jurisdiction + building type + what’s being shown in that detail.
The model still flags with human-review intent so designer judgment stays in the loop.
Stupid question: Would BIM solve these issues? I know northern Europe are somewhat advanced in that direction. What kind of digitalization pace do you see in the US?
How do you get architect to agree with engineer with lighting designer with lighting contractor when they all have different non overlapping deadlines, work periods, knowledge and scope?
edit: if you don't work in the industry, BIM helps for "these two things are in the same spot", but not much for code unless it's about clearance or some spatial based calculation
Even with a perfect BIM model, late changes and discipline silos mean drawings still diverge and coordination issues sneak through.
We’re trying to be the “safety net” that catches what falls through when teams are moving fast and not perfectly in sync.
Also who is this targetted at? Subcontractors, GC, design?
I don't see how subs get much value unless they can use it on ~80% CD for bid phases
how does this work behind the scenes?
Isn't the target persona someone who'd be at best indifferent, and at worst distrustful, of a tech product that leads with how many people invested in it? Especially vs the explanation and actual testimonials you're pushing below the fold to show that?
Or is being that lax normal these days?
Aside: this field is insanely frustrating, the chasm between clash detection and resolution is a right ball ache...between acc, revizto, and aconex clash detection (and the like)..the defacto standard is pretty much telling me x is touching y....great...can you group this crap intelligently to get my hi rise clashes per discipline from 2000 down to 10? Can you navigate me there in revit (yes switchback in revizto is great) but revizto itself could improve.