Material is a multimodal AI workspace that turns drawings, CAD files, spreadsheets, documents, emails, call transcripts, images, video, site photos, chat, and voice notes into one live estimate. The AI reads every signal, reasons over the full project, and keeps the commercial picture current as the project evolves.
It arrives across drawings, spreadsheets, specs, email threads, site photos, voice notes, chat messages, and trade inputs. Material’s AI absorbs all of it — reading drawings, parsing documents, transcribing voice, interpreting photos — so every signal improves the same estimate, instead of starting another disconnected thread.
A coastal house, three weeks into pre-con. Drawings, an architect email, a supervisor’s photo, a builder’s voice memo, a trade thread — each lands in the workspace, and the AI updates the estimate with source-backed reasoning. No reconciliation by hand.
Material is built around a workflow that mirrors how estimates actually get built — and re-built — through the life of a project.
Upload drawings, CAD files, spreadsheets, specs, photos, audio, and documents. Connect Gmail to sync architect and client threads. Paste in trade comments, chat, and site notes.
Material’s AI extracts CAD-derived quantities, parses your existing spreadsheet logic, and produces a grouped estimate by trade — with descriptions, units, rates, totals, feasibility range, and confidence metadata. Minutes, not days.
An architect emails a scope change. A supervisor uploads a site photo. A builder records a voice memo. A trade weighs in. Every signal is assessed by the AI against accumulated project context — not just the latest message.
Inspect any line item: AI-written summary, detailed reasoning, references, and last-updated metadata. Confidence is layered (L1 CAD · L2 Docs · L3 Team · L4 Trades). Margin is tracked as scope evolves.
Material is more than a calculator and more than an assistant. It’s a continuously maintained commercial model of your project, with the evidence right there.
Parse .dwg and .dxf. Extract areas, dimensions, entities, and drawing-derived scope. AI-generated line items linked back to the sheet they came from.
Open any line item to see why it changed and what it changed from — with references to drawings, specs, emails, photos, voice notes, and chat.
L1 CAD, L2 Docs, L3 Team, L4 Trades — each layer reflects what evidence supports the estimate. Maturity is visible at a glance.
Site conditions, design complexity, builder notes, open questions, assumptions — all accumulated, all checked against the next signal that lands.
Talk to the estimate. Drop in a photo. Record a voice note. Material updates the rows that actually changed and tells you what moved and why.
Sync project email through Google Workspace OAuth. Push approved estimates into Xero as quotes and invoices.
Material connects technical scope and source evidence directly to estimate confidence, feasibility range, total cost, and margin risk — so you can see what changed, why it changed, how confident the estimate is, and what it means before it costs you.
Builders and quantity surveyors approach an estimate from different angles. Material gives each role the view they need — backed by the same living evidence.
Material is built for serious commercial work. Source visibility is the trust mechanism — explainable AI, project-scoped access, and signed media URLs are the substrate.
Every drawing, document, email, photo, and audio file is bound to the project it belongs to. Access is checked at every read.
TLS for every connection. Signed URLs for media access. OAuth-based Google integrations — your inbox stays your inbox.
Every estimate change references the evidence behind it. Confidence is layered, not hidden. Uncertainty is shown, not smoothed over.