Start-up Pirros Seeks to Pull the Right Design Detail for the Moment

Whether designing a new project or adding engineering details to an existing design, one of the most time-consuming tasks is adding the small details that almost certainly have been created many times over on past projects.

Pirros, a cloud-based design software platform, is able to identify similar design and engineering details from a firm’s past projects and pull them up from Revit files into its repository, based solely on search terms or finding matches for existing design elements. The Los Angeles-based start-up recently raised a $15-million Series A funding round from investor Elephant Ventures, and in the past few years has grown to serve over 300 customers with over 15,000 users. 

“It’s context intelligence for architects and engineers,” explains Ari Baranian, co-founder and CEO of Pirros. The system is able to ingest 2D designs and documentation in addition to 3D models and assets from past projects, and classify and annotate them for easy retrieval in searches. This addresses a common issue in larger engineering and design firms, where design detailing and other tedious tasks are often just recreating work done by others that’s not easy to look up for reference. 

While Pirros integrates into Revit software, Baranian points out it is also are bridging a gap between projects that is common in many widely used design software suites. “Historically Autodesk’s approach to data has been vertical integration for one project which works well per project, the owner certainly likes seeing everything from start to finish,” he explains. “We break that data out and look at it horizontally across many different projects, allowing for reuse and insights.”

Avoiding Duplicate Work and Saving Time

Working within modern digital document workflows, trying to retrieve a similar design from a past project can be challenging, says Jordan Hague, principal at DCI Engineers. The Seattle-based firm has offices nationwide, and Hague says in the few months that his firm has rolled out Pirros company-wide it has changed how they prepare engineering drawings and project documentation. “We have over 350 engineers all over the country, so knowledge sharing for us is key,” he notes. “It was a challenge trying to avoid reinventing the wheel on every project.”

Working primarily on structural drawings across a range of industry sectors, Hague says the firm never had a good solution for ensuring that company best practices were accessible. “Pirros was a perfect match for what we needed; we finally had a platform that was easily searchable, very intuitive and user-friendly.” 

A central cloud repository holds all of the Revit files from the firm’s past projects, and it has helped not only with finding the common solutions in the company’s past projects, but let engineers in one region quickly understand how another region builds. “We can have an engineer sitting in California doing work on a [project] in the Midwest, and they can quickly reference what that market is accustomed to. Just knowing everything about how a particular type of engineering is done, you just have all these reference projects at your fingertips.”

And beyond pulling from the past, Pirros has allowed DCI Engineers to avoid duplicate work on a given project. “Our engineers are doing the structural analysis while our designer team is doing the Revit model,” explains Hague. This would often lead to parallel work, as engineers and designers labored away in different environments. “Historically we had engineers go through the repository of their projects and find the references and incorporate all the standard details, and then a designer would go through and retrace their steps. With Pirros, the engineer goes through, creates a stash of details they pulled for reference on this project, and then all of that information is waiting for the designer.” 

This was exactly the kind of bottleneck Pirros sought to address, says Baranian. “I used to be a structural engineer, and there was no central store of past materials, so I couldn’t see what type of projects [my firm] had done since I was siloed in the one project I was working on.” 

With the common repository of their projects’ details now available, some customers have asked for Pirros to start offering references and searches for other repeatable aspects of projects, such as take-offs and schedules. For the moment. the focus is on design documents and models rather than anything in scheduling and accounting, says Baranian. 

If there is one place the start-up wants to grow right, it’s in meeting more of the needs of companies that lack internal development teams for design software add-ons. “A larger firm might have a 30-person team to work something up with Autodesk APIs (application programming interfaces) to develop their own design repository system, but 90% of our customers don’t have those kind of resources,” explains Baranian. 

For DCI Engineers, the greatest efficiency gains have been at the early or pre-bid stages of projects, when budgets and time can be constrained. “[Pirros] has helped broadly across our business, but the biggest gains have been in early drawing development because of the ability of the engineer and designer to work together without doubling up each other’s efforts. It really has allowed our engineers to seamless hand off their work to someone working entirely in the Revit space.”