What is TheTakeoff.AI?
TheTakeoff.AI is AI construction estimating software built for industrial fabrication and mechanical work. It reads your drawings and the schedules printed on them, pulls the quantities an estimator needs, checks every number against the exact spot it came from, and reconciles what it found against your written scope of work.
It was made for the contractors who bid petrochemical, refinery and heavy industrial jobs, where one package can run into the hundreds of drawings. It is built and funded by ContraVault AI, which raised $3.1M in June 2026 to bring this into the US market.
TheTakeoff.AI in one sentence
TheTakeoff.ai is AI takeoff software that reads a drawing and its schedules, counts and measures what's on it, prices the labor against your own standards and the published ones, and flags where the drawing, the schedule and your scope of work disagree.
What TheTakeoff.AI actually does
Three things, in the order an estimator does them.
It counts and measures items across disciplines. Piping, steel, electrical and instrumentation, tanks, vessels, and the derived work that rides on top of them. One engine, one review queue, whatever the drawing type.
It runs the labor takeoff on your company's standards and the published ones. MCAA units and code-grounded rules underneath, your own crew productivity on top.
And it flags contradictions across drawings, schedules and scopes. That last one is the check almost nobody else runs, and it's where bids get lost.
Underneath all three sits the same mechanic: click any count, and the sheet opens on the exact valve, member or line that produced it.
Why every number links back to the drawing
Estimators aren't slow because they can't count. They're slow because they won't sign a number they can't defend. Ask a chief estimator to stake a $40M bid on a black box and the conversation ends right there, correctly.
So the engine does a first pass, never a final answer. High-confidence items group together for a bulk accept. Uncertain ones sort to the top of the queue. Keyboard shortcuts mean nobody is dragging a mouse down 200 lines one at a time. The estimator stays in control of every number that leaves the building. What we removed is the blank sheet.
A refinery bid package lands on a Tuesday. Three hundred drawings, a written scope nobody has read closely yet, nine working days. Somewhere in that stack is a line on a P&ID that isn't in your scope, and a scope item with no drawing behind it. Both are money. Neither announces itself. That is the job.
What disciplines does TheTakeoff.AI count?
Two things live on an industrial drawing: the graphics and the tables. TheTakeoff.AI reads both, and the tables do more of the work than counting symbols ever could. On an isometric the bill of material is usually printed right on the sheet. On a vessel or exchanger drawing the nozzle schedule and the TEMA sheet carry most of the count. So the engine pulls the schedule first and treats symbol detection as the backstop.
Piping takeoff is where it started. P&ID counts at the bid stage, then full isometric MTO with welds, diameter-inches, bolt sets and gaskets once the isos exist. From there the same reading transfers anywhere the count sits in a printed schedule or comes off a scaled drawing:
- Tanks and terminals to API 650 and 620, shell plate off the geometry and nozzles off a schedule
- Pressure vessels and heat exchangers to ASME VIII, plate weight off the general arrangement
- Boilers, fired heaters and HRSG units to ASME I, where the tube layouts and pressure-part schedules do the work
- Pipe fabrication to ASME PP, for the cut list, the shop and field weld split, the diameter-inch total and nesting
- Skids, modules and marine piping, reading the same isometric BOMs
- Insulation, coating, fireproofing and heat trace, which reduce to area math once lengths and sizes exist
Does TheTakeoff.AI do structural steel takeoffs?
Yes. Steel reads members off scaled plans and elevations and brings the connections, bolts, welds and paint area with them. It needed its own detection engine rather than a template, so it was a deliberate build rather than a quiet toggle.
Peter Sirois, a Principal at American Steel Fabricators in New England, puts the result plainly: Thetakeoff.ai clears roughly 80% of the desk work off his estimators' plates. Thirty-four years of steel, miscellaneous metals and ornamental work sit behind that judgement.
Does TheTakeoff.AI work for MEP contractors?
For industrial MEP, yes, across the whole scope.
Mechanical is the origin. Electrical and instrumentation reads the cable and panel schedules as tables, with instrument scope coming out as allotments rather than counts, because process taps and routing aren't drawn. Run all of it through one engine and one review queue instead of three tools and three people reconciling by hand at 11pm.
Multi-craft industrial primes that self-perform several of these trades at once get the largest lift, because the reconciliation between trades is currently manual and currently where the errors live. Commercial buildings are a different animal and a different tool. Drywall, finishes and tenant fit-out are not what this was built for, and we'd rather say so than sell a bad fit.
How does TheTakeoff.ai handle labor takeoff?
Quantities are half an estimate. The other half is what it costs your crews to install them.
The labor takeoff layer starts from what the industry already agrees on: MCAA units, with ASME B31.3 for process piping and B16.5 for flanges underneath the quantity logic. Then it takes your side of it. The productivity factors your firm learned on jobs it actually built, the crew mixes you run, the rates you pay. A weld in a congested pipe rack at height is not the same weld as one on a shop bench, and your own history knows that better than any published table.
Both layers stay visible and editable. Same rule as the counts. You can see which factor produced which hour.
What contradictions does TheTakeoff.AI catch?
Counting is half the risk on a bid. The other half is a mismatch that survives all the way to submission.
Thetakeoff.ai checks the drawing against itself, against the spec, and then against the written scope of work. A valve on the P&ID your scope doesn't cover is money you'll spend and can't invoice. A scope item with no drawing behind it is money you should have priced and didn't. The tool surfaces the disagreement, shows both sides, and leaves the call with you before the number goes out.
How much estimation time does TheTakeoff.AI save?
A dense P&ID takes a senior estimator 30 to 60 minutes by hand. A 300-drawing process-unit package eats 250 or more estimator-hours, which is the real ceiling on how many bids a team can chase in a quarter. Full isometric takeoff on a typical refinery job runs closer to 875 hours.
Roughly 70% of that estimation time comes back. Not because anyone stopped checking the work, but because checking a first pass is a fundamentally faster motion than building one from a blank sheet. The hours don't leave the business. They move to the bids you were turning down.
How is TheTakeoff.AI different from other takeoff software?
Three capabilities usually arrive in separate products. One reads the drawing and its schedules with AI. Another gives the estimator a real review step and keeps them in control. The third carries the estimating math from quantities to a priced bid.
The heavy estimating packages have the math. FastPIPE and Trimble Accubid carry catalogs of over 100,000 items with MCAA labor units built in, and they price a bill of quantities well. They automated the arithmetic, not the reading, so you still key in every line by hand. The AI readers built for commercial buildings count objects on a floor plan and stop well short of welds and diameter-inches.
Thetakeoff.ai holds all three in one place, as construction takeoff software you run yourself, grounded in the codes estimators already cite.
Who is behind Thetakeoff.AI?
TheTakeoff.AI is built by ContraVault AI, founded in 2024 by Sayan Sen, Isha Juneja and Tanmay Juneja. The company got here by reading procurement documents at volume. More than a million bid documents have passed through the platform as training data, which is where the reading engine learned to treat a printed schedule as the primary source and a symbol as the fallback.
In June 2026 ContraVault AI raised $3.1M in a pre-Series A round led by Chiratae Ventures, with participation from existing investor Titan Capital Winners Fund. Before that round the company had raised around $600K from Titan Capital and a group of angels. The capital is pointed at two things: deepening the AI, and the US expansion that Thetakeoff.ai is.
Put a drawing through it
Take one sheet from a package you're bidding this month and bring it to a call. We'll run it on your own drawing type, work through the review queue, and you click the counts you don't believe. Bring the whole estimating team. Twenty minutes will tell you more than any demo video.
