Togal.AI Wins Start-Up Pitch Competition at The Big 5 Global Construction Event

Out of a field of 10 startups and before a panel of 10 judges, construction tech firm Togal.AI won the start-up pitch competition this week at The Big 5, a global construction event in Dubai.

The prize was a “bespoke and curated marketing package worth $25,000,” according to the event’s organizers. Part includes the possibility of being chosen by ALEC Engineering & Contracting for a pilot project.

“Togal.AI uses machine learning to automatically estimate construction plans and take-offs — compressing weeks of work into mere seconds,” a company press release said. “Estimators at Coastal Construction, the largest General Contractor in Florida, used Togal to cut their workload by 40 percent – saving around $1 million per year and 10,000 hours of work.”

“The construction industry has been slow to adopt AI, but with supply chain strains, labor shortages and record-high material prices, contractors are now looking for innovations like Togal to become more efficient,” the release quoted Togal.AI founder and CEO Patrick Murphy.

The company’s website says that the software “can eliminate as much as 80% of the manual takeoff process, saving estimators a significant amount of time.” The company claims 98% accuracy in the estimates as a machine learning component learns from corrections and improves over time.

In one sense, a search for extremely high accuracy, while desirable, may not be as important as another benefit. Often in software-driven systems for things like valuations or underwriting, the largest value from the software is the creation of a starting place for human experts. Especially with machine learning systems early in their use, significant numbers of errors are to be expected and it takes a human to fix them.

But having at least a first cut of numbers, data moved from sources to where it is needed in a database or spreadsheet, and formatting of a report that will be adjusted by a human expert saves significant time that can be put back into deeper analysis or saved for other tasks.

Togal has participated in a number of venture capital events, likely to gain attention from both potential customers and, as important for a startup, from potential investors. Crunchbase.com, an online site with information about startups, didn’t list any investments to date, which is unusual, although the company might have raised money and not publicized it at all.