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Posted by aakashprasad91 1 day ago

Launch HN: InspectMind (YC W24) – AI agent for reviewing construction drawings

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Shuangling of InspectMind (https://www.inspectmind.ai/), an AI “plan checker” that finds issues in construction drawings, details, and specs.

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!

42 points | 43 commentspage 2
BoorishBears 1 day ago|
Not shade, and it's a small thing, but why do you list your investors as social proof here?

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?

aakashprasad91 1 day ago|
Totally fair callout and appreciate the feedback. We’re already testing alternative hero layouts focused purely on real customer results and example issues caught. Our goal is to win trust by demonstrating usefulness/results, not who invested in us.
an_aparallel 1 day ago||
where would my firms documents end up (on whos servers) to do this checking? I dont know how any firm would just hand out their cd's just like 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.

aakashprasad91 1 day ago|||
Yes one of the biggest values of our system is reducing “noise.” Instead of surfacing 2,000 micro-clashes, we cluster findings into higher-order issues (e.g., “all conflicts caused by this duct run” or “all lighting mismatches tied to this dimming spec”). We’re not a BIM viewer yet, but we do map issues back to sheet locations, callouts, and detail references so teams can navigate directly to the real source of the problem.
an_aparallel 1 day ago||
Sounds good, what is the typical workflow aggregating sheet sets in question for a certain phase? I assume user collates and drops for analysis?
aakashprasad91 1 day ago|||
Today the workflow is simple: users just drag-and-drop the full drawing/spec set (ZIP or PDFs) for whatever phase they want reviewed. The system automatically splits sheets by discipline, reconstructs callout relationships, and runs the checks. We’ll be adding integrations with ACC/Procore/Revit exports so this becomes even more automated.
aakashprasad91 1 day ago|||
Yes today users simply gather the sheets for whatever phase they want reviewed (DD, 80% CDs, 100% CDs, etc.), ZIP them or upload PDFs directly, and the system handles the rest. It auto-detects disciplines, reconstructs callout graphs, and runs checks across the full set. We're also adding integrations with ACC/Procore/Revit so sheet aggregation becomes automatic.
aakashprasad91 1 day ago||||
We store files securely on AWS with strict access controls, encryption in transit and at rest, and zero sharing outside the file owner’s account. Only our engineers can access a project for debugging and only if the customer explicitly allows it. We can also offer an enterprise option with private cloud/VPC deployment for firms that require even tighter controls. Users can delete all files permanently at any time.
shuangly 1 day ago|||
Documents are stored on AWS with strict access controls, meaning they are only accessible to the file owner and, if necessary, our engineers for debugging purposes. After the check, users can delete the project and optionally permanently delete the files from our S3 buckets on AWS.
breedmesmn 1 day ago|
[flagged]
aakashprasad91 1 day ago|
Could you share a bit more about what didn’t work on your end?
breedmesmn 1 day ago||
[flagged]
aakashprasad91 1 day ago||
That comment comes across as racially loaded and isn’t helpful. If you ran into a real issue, I’m happy to take a look.