Chicago Ventures leads the seed round as Guthrie AI expands its platform to recruit, train, and manage Virtual Bid Assistants, helping commercial glass contractors shorten bid cycles and take on more work without adding full-time estimating staff.
Every missed bid has a cost. For commercial glass contractors, the biggest bottleneck often isn’t demand. It’s time. Estimators spend hours organizing bid packages, requesting supplier pricing, sorting drawings, and moving information between software before they can focus on pricing a project. Guthrie AI wants to change that. The construction technology startup has raised a $4 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures to grow a platform that supplies trained Virtual Bid Assistants to contractors, helping them bid on more projects without increasing headcount.
The funding comes as construction firms continue to face a shortage of experienced estimators, pushing companies to find new ways to keep up with growing workloads. Guthrie AI says contractors using its platform have increased bidding capacity by up to 70%, reducing turnaround times from weeks to days. The company has already placed 52 Virtual Bid Assistants with glass contractors and suppliers across the United States.
Guthrie AI plans to use the new capital to hire more engineers, expand its Virtual Bid Assistant program, and build deeper integrations with the software construction estimators already rely on. The company is betting that the future of construction estimating will pair AI automation with skilled human workers, giving contractors a way to bid on more projects without sacrificing quality or waiting months to recruit experienced staff.
Guthrie AI was founded by Ted Baumgardner, whose experience in the commercial glass industry shaped the company’s direction long before it became a startup. Baumgardner grew up working in his family’s glass business before serving as a Marine intelligence officer. After returning to construction estimating, he applied structured analytical methods from military intelligence to organize bid invitations and reduce the administrative work that consumed much of an estimator’s day.
That experience eventually grew into Guthrie AI after two years of pilots with industry partners.
Construction tech startup Guthrie AI raises $4M seed round led by Chicago Ventures to automate contractor workflows
The company’s product blends software with trained human assistants rather than replacing estimators with artificial intelligence. Guthrie AI recruits, trains, and manages Virtual Bid Assistants who handle much of the repetitive work surrounding construction bids. Their responsibilities include organizing project files, identifying bid scope, preparing quote requests, tracking supplier responses, and transferring information across commonly used estimating tools.
The platform’s AI layer automates much of the coordination that traditionally required manual effort. It can ingest bid invitations, identify project scope, route work to the appropriate assistant, and synchronize information between applications such as Bluebeam, Microsoft Outlook, and Excel.
“We’re not building a self-driving car. Not yet. There’s still a person behind the wheel, a real “VBA” who knows how to do a takeoff and price a job the way you need. What we built is the app that makes it easy to hire that person, train them, and work with them every day. Uber never built a car. What they built was the app that makes it easy to find a driver. That’s what we’re doing for glazing contractors,” said Ted Baumgardner, founder and President of Guthrie AI.
The company compares its Virtual Bid Assistants to the relationship between nurses and physicians. The estimator remains responsible for pricing, judgment, and winning work. The assistant prepares the necessary information so the estimator can spend more time evaluating projects rather than chasing paperwork.
“We realized that a lot of estimator time was getting eaten up just transferring data from Bluebeam to Excel to email or other platforms. We’ve built the connectors so that once information is in Bluebeam, it is automatically transferred to the formats that our clients need it in,” said Tuneer De, co-founder and Head of Product at Guthrie AI.
Chicago Ventures backed the company after betting that construction software works best when founders have firsthand experience solving the problem they are addressing.
“The hardest thing to find in construction tech is a founder who has actually lived the problem. Ted grew up doing takeoffs in his family’s glass business before serving as a Marine intelligence officer. He knows this trade from the inside and has a tenacious, competitive spirit. If anyone has what it takes to build the complex automations required to support glaziers or the construction trades broadly, we believe it’s going to be Ted,” said Rob Chesney, General Partner at Chicago Ventures.
