Guthrie AI, a Philadelphia-based construction technology company that recruits, trains, and places Virtual Bid Assistants for glazing contractors, has raised a $4 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures. The funding will expand Guthrie AI’s engineering team, deepen integrations with tools estimators already use, including Bluebeam, Outlook and Excel—and grow the platform that makes it easy for glazing contractors to hire, supervise and work with a trained bid assistant from day one.
The glazing estimating market faces a structural labor problem that Guthrie AI is designed to address. General contractors are demanding more scope breakouts, more rounds of pricing, and more budget iterations before buying out jobs, while margins are shrinking and the risk glaziers must absorb is increasing. At the same time, there are not enough people entering the industry to fill estimating roles, and even when a contractor finds the right hire, integrating that person into existing workflows takes many months. The result is that experienced estimators are stretched thin, spending significant time on administrative tasks—downloading files, organizing bid invites, transferring data between Bluebeam, Excel and email—rather than on the judgment-intensive work of understanding scope, pricing risk and building client relationships.
Guthrie AI’s model is built around the concept of a Virtual Bid Assistant, described as the “nurse” to the estimator’s “doctor.” A VBA automatically downloads and organizes project files, identifies scope, prepares quote requests, and routes pricing to vendors on time, giving the estimator a structured road map by the time they engage with a job. The company’s AI layer ingests bid invites, automatically identifies scope, and routes tasks to the client’s assigned VBA, handling the delegation and instruction overhead that typically makes it harder to hand off work than to do it yourself. Guthrie AI has built direct connectors so that information in Bluebeam is automatically converted into the formats clients need, eliminating the manual data transfer step that consumes significant estimator time.
Founder and president Ted Baumgardner is a Marine Intelligence Officer turned glazing estimator who developed structured analytic techniques—drawn from military intelligence methodology—to organize bid invites and learn jobs faster. He piloted the approach with industry partners for two years before building it into a platform and opening Guthrie AI to the broader market. The company has already placed trained Virtual Bid Assistants with 52 glaziers and vendors nationwide. Early results show contractors bidding 70% more work without adding full-time staff and cutting bid turnaround from weeks to days. Co-founder and head of product Tuneer De built the integration layer that eliminates the manual data transfer between estimating and communication tools.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Ted Baumgardner, Founder and President, Guthrie AI
“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.”
Tuneer De, Co-Founder and Head of Product, Guthrie AI
“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.”
Rob Chesney, General Partner, Chicago Ventures
