About Fresco: AI Built Exclusively for Division 8

Fresco builds AI for Division 8 construction estimating — doors, frames, and hardware. We are the only AI takeoff tool built exclusively for Division 8, and we are more accurate than the best human estimator.

More than 70 companies across the United States and Canada use Fresco to take off commercial construction projects, from 30-door tenant improvements to 4,000-door hospitals. Our customers include specialty subcontractors, door and hardware distributors, manufacturers, and two of the three largest Division 8 distributors in North America. Thousands of takeoffs run through our platform every month.

How We Got Here

Fresco did not start in Division 8. We started building AI tools for general contractors who needed to make sense of massive document sets — specifications, RFIs, submittals, contracts. We thought the problem was finding information. It turned out the problem was understanding construction drawings.

Construction drawings are unlike anything else in the world. Every drawing is proprietary. The symbology is specific to each trade. And there is almost no publicly available training data for AI models to learn from — the gap is so significant that at one industry conference, a representative from Nvidia was offering free compute to anyone who would share their construction drawings. That is how scarce the data is.

We realized that to solve the problem of reading construction drawings with AI, we had to start with the hardest trade and get it right. Division 8 is, by most accounts, the most complex takeoff in commercial construction. Every door in a building carries a unique combination of size, material, fire rating, hardware set, frame type, and accessories. A single project can have hundreds of openings, each with dozens of components, governed by specifications that frequently contradict the door schedule and the floor plans.

We trained our own AI models on millions of construction drawings sourced through our work with general contractors and subcontractors. Those models do not just count doors. They read the door schedule, the floor plans, the hardware specification, and the elevations simultaneously — the same way a human estimator does — and they flag every place where those documents disagree. The estimator makes the final decisions. Fresco does the work of finding every decision that needs to be made.

What We Believe

Division 8 estimators are specialists. They carry decades of knowledge about how doors, frames, and hardware work together in a building. That knowledge should be spent on judgment calls — resolving discrepancies, qualifying assumptions, constructing competitive bids — not on the mechanical work of pulling data off plans and reformatting it into spreadsheets.

We built Fresco to handle the 90% of a takeoff that is rote extraction and cross-referencing, so the estimator can focus on the 10% that requires real expertise. We are not a black box. We do not replace the estimator. We start them on third base.

Our Team

Fresco was founded by Arvind Veluvali and Akhil Gupta. We are a Y Combinator-backed company (F24) based in San Francisco.

Arvind leads sales and customer relationships. Before Fresco, he worked in medical technology. He will tell you that door people are a lot friendlier than doctors.

Akhil leads engineering and AI development. He built the proprietary models that allow Fresco to read construction drawings with a level of accuracy that general-purpose AI systems cannot match. His view: the bottleneck on AI intelligence is not the models. It is the data. And construction is one of the industries where that bottleneck matters most.

If you are a Division 8 estimator, a door and hardware distributor, or a general contractor evaluating self-perform, we would like to show you what Fresco can do on your next project.