In construction, mistakes made on paper become millions lost in the field.

Every year, poor design coordination results in over $500 billion in global construction waste. Change orders, RFIs, and delays are often traced back to avoidable oversights in the early stages of project design. These breakdowns don’t just affect margins—they stall projects, strain teams, and erode trust across the development lifecycle.

That’s why we helped build LightTable.

Fixing the Broken Peer Review Process

Before the first shovel hits the ground, developers rely on peer reviews to catch coordination issues in drawings—architectural, structural, and MEP. But the current process is slow, expensive, and flawed. Reports can take up to 20 weeks, cost six figures, and still miss critical errors.

LightTable’s platform changes that. By applying AI to document coordination and constructability review, LightTable surfaces building design issues in minutes—not months—and catches 4x more errors than traditional workflows. Early pilots suggest the platform can reduce design coordination mistakes by up to 70%, improving project IRRs by 3–4 percentage points.

It’s a leap forward in speed, accuracy, and impact—and a clear answer to one of development’s most persistent bottlenecks.

From Incubation to Execution

We co-incubated LightTable with our friends at Primary Venture Partners because we saw a rare combination of urgency and opportunity.

This is an exceptionally complex product to build. It demands deep expertise in both LLMs and computer vision to interpret and compare a wide array of complex construction drawings at scale. That level of sophistication creates a wide, defensible moat—and it’s this team’s technical and domain depth that makes the platform’s speed and accuracy possible.

Ben Waters, a long-time friend of our firm, is an accomplished architect who has lived the pain of missed coordination firsthand while designing projects at SOM and Gensler. Paul Zeckser spent over a decade scaling product at HomeAdvisor and Sealed. Dan Becker built enterprise AI systems at Google Cloud and DataRobot. 

We’ve watched them secure design partnerships with leading national developers, including Hines, The Related Group, Greystar, Mill Creek, and Alliance, and deliver real value early. They’re solving a problem developers feel acutely—and doing it in collaboration with the people who stand to benefit most.

Looking Ahead

Starting with AI-powered peer review offers a high-impact entry point into an enormous market. Developers currently spend $8.1 billion annually on peer review services—and many still opt out entirely due to cost and speed constraints. By delivering faster, more accurate reviews at a fraction of the cost, LightTable is positioned to become a system of record in the preconstruction stack.

As the platform evolves, we see a path toward broader design collaboration, developer-centric workflows, and real-time coordination across every stakeholder in the building process.

Construction needs better tools—not just for productivity, but for certainty. We believe LightTable can redefine how design gets done: faster, smarter, and with fewer downstream surprises.

We’re excited to support the LightTable team as they redefine how better buildings get built, long before anyone breaks ground.

Further Reading: LightTable Comes Out of Stealth Mode With $6M Seed Round via Commercial Observer.