Why We Invested in LightTable: Fixing Design Before It Breaks Ground

Bad design is one of the most persistent, overlooked, and expensive problems in construction. Change orders caused by coordination issues, missed specs, or incompatible designs aren’t just costly—they’re preventable.

In the U.S., hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on construction every year. Projects are chronically delayed and over budget, and with interest rates where they are, new development has become even more difficult in many markets. The majority of change orders could be caught in the pre-construction phase, but today’s review process is slow, expensive, and imperfect.

Large developers often outsource drawing reviews to third-party firms, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for reports that take 6–20 weeks to deliver—and still contain errors. These delays and oversights ripple through every stakeholder, from architects to subcontractors, costing valuable time and eroding margins.

LightTable solves this. By applying AI-powered coordination and peer review, they can eliminate up to two-thirds, improving project IRRs by 3–4 points. For real estate owners, this means delivering projects faster, on budget, and with fewer costly surprises. For architects and subcontractors, it means less time revisiting old projects to fix preventable mistakes.

The Right Wedge: Peer Review

We backed LightTable in 2024 based on a simple premise: peer review today is manual, expensive, and error-prone—and AI can do it better. Starting with coordination issues across disciplines creates a powerful wedge to expand into broader design optimization and collaboration.

Three things gave us conviction:

1. Acute pain: Developers feel the cost and time impact most directly.
2. Adoption leverage: They can push better tooling across architects and engineers.
3. Workflow ownership: Controlling the design review process opens the door to downstream automation, from value engineering to inventory-aware specs.

Since funding in November, LightTable has signed product development and design partnerships or pilots with five of the top ten developers in the U.S., including Hines, The Related Group, Greystar, Mill Creek, and Alliance. These pilots are already driving real-world feedback and product iteration, setting the stage for enterprise contracts with annual values that could reach seven figures.

Built With—and For—the Industry’s Best

LightTable’s go-to-market strategy is rooted in deep collaboration. Through these design partnerships, the team is running real projects and building in lockstep with enterprise users.

Paul Zeckser, Dan Becker, and Ben Waters didn’t just set out to build better design tools—they’re rethinking how buildings get designed from the ground up.

Paul, a product-first leader with sharp commercial instincts, spent over a decade shaping HomeAdvisor before leading product at Sealed. He’s known for turning big product visions into real market wins.

Dan, a seasoned AI and simulation engineer, founded a startup that was acquired by DataRobot and helped enterprise teams adopt AI. Frustrated by how slowly legacy players like Autodesk move, he decided to build LightTable: an AI-native company already shipping faster than most incumbents can prototype.

Ben, a trained architect that has worked at SOM and Gensler, knows and has lived the pain of coordinating large drawing sets, only to see RFIs and Change Orders pile up. He was convinced AI could transform this archaic practice of human-only review and deliver massive ROI for builders.

Together, they’re the team with the perfect set of backgrounds to build for speed—and for a smarter, more intuitive future in design.

Why We’re Excited

LightTable is starting where the pain is most acute—pre-construction peer review—and building a platform that could become the coordination layer for the entire industry. The combination of early traction with top developers, a pragmatic and valuable product, and a sharp, fast-moving team makes this exactly the kind of founder-led business we want to partner with.

We’re proud to be backing Paul, Dan, Ben,and the team as they redefine how better buildings get built, long before anyone breaks ground.