Launch HN: Rudus (YC P26) – AI for concrete contractors

Hi HN, we’re Rishi and Sahil. We’ve developed Rudus ( https://www.rudus.ai/ ), an AI-powered takeoff and estimation platform built for concrete subcontractors. Takeoff is the process of measuring and quantifying materials from concrete plan sheets. Rudus identifies every concrete structure (footings, walls, columns, slabs), pulls in related details, and eliminates hours of manual quantity calculation. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAMNDRWEdlI . The problem: Concrete subcontractors are the backbone of every building, but their estimating workflow hasn't changed in 20 years. Right now, a senior estimator opens a PDF, manually traces every footing and grade beam, then hand-builds an Excel spreadsheet with 300+ line items- volumes, formwork, rebar by bar size with lap splices and development lengths. Bids can take weeks and even months. Most firms have just a few estimators, meaning they physically cannot bid on most of the work available to them. The software incumbent in this trade hasn’t been updated since 2020. Beyond that, every AI takeoff tool on the market was built for GCs and treats concrete as one checkbox, rather than working around how concrete estimators actually price work. We’re building Rudus for this trade and only this trade. We started this when Sahil took a construction management class and realized how the estimation workflows hadn't changed in decades. We started cold calling, walking into offices with donuts, showing up at job sites, and everyone told us the same thing: slow estimation is the biggest bottleneck in growing their business, but every new product they've tried has failed. We quickly realized that the reason those tools failed is a lack of trust and frequent errors causing later problems. Estimators stake million to billion dollar bids on these numbers, and they are clear that they won’t trade their workflow for a black box. We took a different approach: software that intelligently accelerates their current workflows r