SF Business Times - After selling a company to Apple, this entrepreneur is putting AI to work in construction

(San Francisco Business Times) - Lubomir Bourdev has spent nearly three decades studying visual information as a computer scientist for some of the world’s biggest tech companies. Now, at Primepoint Labs, he's turning that expertise towards construction project management that is already being used on a signature San Francisco development.

Likening his startup's tools to Anthropic's popular offering for software engineering, Bourdev told the Business Times he aspires to make the "Claude Code for construction."

“What we're building is actually software that reduces risk,” Bourdev said. A small mistake can cause errors and delays that become “incredibly expensive” for construction projects.

The San Mateo-based startup has been working with UCSF on its Parnassus campus in San Francisco. That project, which broke ground in 2024, is estimated to open in 2030 and cost more than $4 billion.

Bourdev's AI bonafides are considerable. He spent more than 13 years at Adobe working on object recognition while simultaneously earning a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He went on to become a founding member of Facebook’s AI Research team, which was led by Yann LeCun, a globally renowned expert known as one of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence.

Bourdev started a video compression startup, WaveOne, and sold it to Apple for an undisclosed amount in 2023.  The WSJ chronicled WaveOne’s genesis in a 2015 profile which described the startup as “a case of life imitating art imitating life.” HBO’s sitcom “Silicon Valley," which centered on a startup pursuing similar technology, debuted the previous year.

WaveOne was "using neural networks to do video compression, which was very innovative at that time. We got really good results, but it was difficult to actually take this and make a business out of it,” Bourdev said. “But Apple really liked it.”

He had a general idea of what he wanted to do next — using AI and large language models to improve collaborative processes — and credits venture capitalist Vinod Khosla for inspiring what would become Primepoint Labs. Khosla Ventures had invested in WaveOne.

Khosla suggested he look at the construction industry, Bourdev said. That led to the realization that construction projects involve a massive amount of data, contractors and drawings — visual information.

“It's incredibly complex, and no one can stay on top of the data,” Bourdev said.

Minimal disruption

That’s where Primepoint comes in. It is developing project management software that analyzes both written and visual information wherever that is, including blueprints and PDFs. The goal is to help workers find accurate information quickly. To do this, Primepoint integrates with existing design software from other providers like Autodesk and builds a “knowledge graph” on top of a customer’s own data.

The process also has to work for the people using it. Primepoint tries “to minimize any disruption” to existing workflows and has designed the product to be “intuitive,” Bourdev said.

Investors have signed on, including his former Facebook colleague LeCun who participated in Primepoint’s $10 million seed round. The funding was co-led by NextView Ventures; Penny Jar Capital, a Palo Alto firm that counts Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry as a “special advisor”; and Navitas Capital. Other investors include GS Futures and Aglaé Ventures. Khosla Ventures has not invested.

Neither Bourdev, the startup’s chief executive, nor co-founder Hamid Palo, its chief product officer, have construction industry experience. So they hired Kamran Azarbal, who spent a decade at building contractor Webcor, as their vice president of strategy.

Azarbal’s construction experience has been “instrumental” for Primepoint, Bourdev said. Webcor is the general contractor on the UCSF project as part of a joint venture, and Azarbal was able to make a "warm introduction," Bourdev said.

Bourdev aims to at least double the size of the team soon. Currently, there are just six people all of whom are software engineers, including the founders.

They work together in person four days a week at the company’s San Mateo office. Some people choose to work weekends, but Bourdev doesn’t mandate a 9-9-6 hustle culture — where people are expected to work twelve hours a days, six days a week.

Bourdev encourages “work life balance,” he said. “We don't expect people to work on weekends, but what happens is, everybody ends up doing that just because people are so excited … I have mixed feelings about this.”