We’re thrilled to share that Bobyard has raised a $35M Series A, led by 8VC, with participation from Pear VC, Primary Venture Partners, Tishman Speyer, RXR, Caffeinated Capital, and Merrick Ventures.
Founded in 2023, Bobyard is the AI platform transforming how contractors perform construction takeoffs and estimates with CV and NLP models. Construction and landscaping have long been overlooked by technology, and Bobyard is uniquely positioned to bring modern AI to the takeoff and estimating process—helping contractors bid faster, win more work, and grow revenue.
How we met Bobyard
We first met Bobyard Founder & CEO Michael Ding when he applied to the Pear Competition as a Stanford freshman. Even at 19, he immediately stood out. He spoke with such clarity about the problem he was solving and demonstrated a remarkable combination of ambition, focus, and technical expertise.
Michael had experienced the pain of remodeling projects himself—so much so that he earned his California general contractor license as a teenager to better understand the workflows he wanted to fix! That level of determination made it obvious he was a special founder.
Michael then joined PearX, our 12-week accelerator program, as part of our S23 cohort. After Demo Day, Bobyard raised a $3.5M seed round from Primary, with participation from Pear.
Why we invested
We’ve backed Bobyard from PearX to Seed and now Series A, and our conviction has only grown. Michael is one of the most driven founders I’ve worked with. His “walk through walls” mentality sets the tone for a world-class, high-ownership team, and the clarity of their vision and execution has been exceptional from day one.
Even when Michael was working on Bobyard solo, he was the first one in, and last one out at the office. Here’s a photo of Michael with Pejman at 10pm at Pear Studio one evening.
Bobyard’s opportunity to transform construction—and beyond
The opportunity in front of Bobyard is massive.
Construction, landscaping, and the trades represent more than $1T in annual U.S. spend, yet remain among the least digitized industries. Within that, the takeoff and estimating workflow—measuring drawings, counting materials, building bids—is both mission-critical and painfully manual.
Bobyard changes that. Their proprietary computer-vision models automate up to 70% of the quantity and material takeoff process, turning static blueprints into structured, trade-specific data. Contractors can now prepare accurate bids in minutes instead of hours.
Second, there’s a clear buying incentive: easier revenue. Faster bid and estimate cycles mean contractors can quote win more jobs. We’ve seen this dynamic firsthand before: products that directly improve GTM performance spread quickly because the ROI is immediate and obvious.
Finally, recent advances in GenAI and CV/NLP have made it possible to build models that interpret construction drawings with the intuition of experienced estimators. This level of automation simply wasn’t possible before, and Bobyard is one of the first teams with the technical depth to make it real.
Bobyard has nearly tripled in team size in the past year and now has hundreds of customers. Companies like Chopper Landscaping, K & D Landscaping, New Path Landscape, and Smith & Enright are seeing 50-70% faster takeoffs, 5x more bid volume, and an average of $1.1M in additional revenue per employee annually. And Michael and team are just getting started.
What’s next for Bobyard
With this new round, Bobyard will continue advancing its AI models and product capabilities in landscaping while expanding into additional trades including drywall, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, and framing. To accelerate product innovation and support growth, Bobyard is also expanding its engineering and GTM teams.
We’re honored to continue supporting Michael and team and can’t wait to see what’s next for Bobyard.