Construction estimating · Quantity takeoff
Quantity takeoff is still printouts, highlighters, a calculator and Excel. CumuAI moves that whole workflow into the browser — and not just the interface: how each number was derived stays open for anyone to inspect.
Talk to us about your project →The problem
Every AI takeoff tool on the market competes on accuracy — 98%, 99%, ±1%. Those figures are all self-reported, with no third-party verification. What an estimator actually needs is not a tidy percentage, but the ability to pull up the math when something goes wrong.
Two more things no web tool has solved: large drawings crawl the moment you open them, and every engine is bound to English drawings and North American practice. Taiwanese structural drawings, Taiwanese estimating convention — nobody is doing it.
What we build
01
A column is a box with width and depth, a beam a centreline with half-width, a slab a polygon. The markup is real vector geometry — not coloured boxes drawn on a screenshot — so every inference downstream has something to stand on.
02
Competing 2D takeoff tools all stop at single-piece geometry; junction resolution exists only inside BIM. We build a BIM-grade junction ledger directly on the PDF: beam clear lengths trim to the column face, and deductions for supported beam ends and slab-over-column generate themselves.
03
Formwork tables follow the local "concrete and formwork estimating" SOP, in the same shape as the spreadsheet the estimator already keeps by hand. Automation only fills faces you have not set — the estimator's judgement always wins.
Evidence
Validated on a real project: an 84-page A3 vector structural drawing set, 19,000–43,000 paths per page. One floor fully marked up — columns, beams, walls, slabs — then every formwork quantity compared item by item against the estimator's hand-signed sheet.
About the name
A cumulus cloud forms from the bottom up, gathering and building vertically, layer on layer. That is the same motion as an estimate accumulating brick by brick into a total, and as a building rising from its foundation — all of it is accumulation.
We think the technology works the same way. There is no one-step magic here, only getting each number right, and accountable, and stacking them up.
Contact
The product is still being sharpened. We are looking for construction and estimating teams willing to help get it right.
CEO
Ron Shih