PataBid raises $2m pre-seed for AI estimating aimed at trade contractors

PataBid raises $2m pre-seed for AI estimating aimed at trade contractors

20 October 2026: PataBid, a Calgary company that makes estimating software for specialist building contractors, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Graphite Ventures, with Sprout Fund, Bluesky Equities, Inverted Ventures and its earlier angel investors taking part. The money goes into AI product development, supplier partnerships and sales channels, and selling across North America.

Not yet independently verified. PataBid's own announcement, datelined Calgary, names Graphite Ventures as lead; we found no investor post, and the customer and bid-value figures are the company's own. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The work it automates

Before a contractor can bid for the electrical, plumbing or fire protection package on a building, someone has to count every fixture, length of pipe and run of cable on the drawings and price it. That takeoff and estimating work is slow and depends on experienced estimators. PataBid's product, Quantify, is sold to electrical, mechanical, plumbing and fire protection contractors in Canada and the US, with licences starting at $2,460 a year. The company says more than 200 contractors use it and that more than $2 billion of bid value has gone through the platform.

In Quantify an estimator selects an item on a drawing, sets its attributes, and the software finds the matching items across the rest of the plans. Prices come from a built-in library of more than 60,000 items and assemblies and from live links to suppliers such as Gescan and City Electric Supply, which bring each contractor's own pricing into the estimate, and a proposal module turns the result into a bid. Its site lists residential, commercial, industrial and institutional work, including hospitals and universities, and building automation alongside the core trades.

The next product is Newton, a conversational estimating agent now in beta with selected customers, which PataBid plans to launch commercially in 2027.

What the investor and founder say

"PataBid has built something contractors genuinely need," said Adrian Mitchell, principal at Graphite Ventures, adding that founder Melvin Newman and his team "bring decades of industry knowledge to estimating, one of construction's most outdated processes." Newman, founder and chief executive, frames the ambition as changing "how the industry estimates complex plumbing and electrical work".

Where it fits

PataBid's pitch is one product for the mechanical and electrical trades in both Canada and the US, at a price it publishes. Our construction estimating software category lists eight products, with separate categories for plumbing estimating (four) and electrical estimating (one).

Company profile on TrustList: PataBid

Related on TrustList:

• ACIMUS raises ¥65m for AI that builds BIM models from plain language
• Ailytics raises $7.4m to turn old site cameras into safety AI
• Mach9 raises $34m Series A to turn road scans into engineering drawings

Sources

• PataBid: PataBid raises $2 million pre-seed round to modernize construction estimating with AI, 20 October 2026
• BetaKit: PataBid raises $2 million to expand AI construction estimator, 21 October 2026
• PataBid: PataBid raises $2 million pre-seed round, 20 October 2026