Vertical AI estimating, managed end to end
Pinnacia builds you a Razorback engine — a private AI estimator trained on your own documents, rules, and pricing history. We deploy it, run it, and keep it accurate as a managed service.
Every client gets their own engine. Razorback is the platform we build it on, not a shared application you log into alongside your competitors.
Razorback engine
The bottleneck
Bid volume keeps climbing. The number of people who can price work accurately does not. Everything in between gets absorbed by your most expensive, least replaceable staff.
Someone opens the plans, reads the scope, cross-checks the specs, squints at site photos, and rebuilds takeoff detail that your company has already priced dozens of times. The work is repetitive, but it still requires judgment, so it lands on senior people.
Assumptions live in individual heads. Waste factors, crew rates, exclusions, and how aggressive to be on a given client all shift by who picked up the file. Leadership finds out at the margin review, not at bid time.
Bids get declined, deprioritized, or submitted thin because the queue was full. The lost revenue never shows up in a report — it shows up as the bids you never sent.
Traditional estimating platforms organize the process. They do not capture your company's judgment, your local market playbook, or the reasons your best estimator prices a specific job the way they do. That knowledge stays undocumented and walks out the door at retirement.
As everyone adopts the same off-the-shelf AI tools, access to AI stops being an advantage. What is left is proprietary workflow, proprietary data, and better decisions at the moment a number gets committed.
The Razorback engine
Pinnacia encodes your estimating process into six connected layers. Each layer is configured to your documents, your rules, and your thresholds — not to a generic industry template. Razorback is the platform; the engine that comes out of it is built for one company only, yours.
Plans, scopes, specs, photos, and supporting documents read in the formats you already receive.
Documents converted into structured line items that match your takeoff and quoting format.
Your rules, your assumptions, your pricing structure — applied the same way on every job.
The edge cases your best estimator already knows, written down and applied consistently.
The engine flags what it is not sure about instead of quietly guessing.
Human oversight routed in wherever confidence is low or dollar risk is high.
Engine layers
A Razorback engine never submits a bid unsupervised. You set the confidence floor and the dollar thresholds that force a review, and every released estimate carries a named approver.
The offer
Two layers. One builds your Razorback engine around your process. The other keeps it accurate as your work, crews, costs, and clients change.
Pinnacia is a long-term operating partner, not a one-time implementation vendor. The maintained Razorback engine is the product. We are not selling access to AI — we are selling a maintained operating system for how your company estimates work.
Fit
We would rather disqualify early than build a Razorback engine on a process nobody inside the company owns.
Plan-and-spec bid packages, invitation-to-bid volume, tight submission windows.
High-frequency scoped work where quoting speed decides who gets the job.
Photo-and-scope documentation, carrier-facing line item discipline, defensible pricing.
Drawing-driven quotes, material and labor build-ups, repeat configurations.
Large multi-line RFQs, substitutions, and margin rules applied under time pressure.
Engagement
Four stages, one deployed workflow at the end. Durations below are indicative and get firmed up in discovery.
Pinnacia sits with your estimators and leadership, walks real bids end to end, and identifies the workflow with the highest return.
[1–2 weeks]Assumptions, pricing structure, exclusions, and approval thresholds get documented and mapped against your historical documents.
[2–3 weeks]We run your engine against jobs you have already priced and tune until the output holds up to your chief estimator's review.
[3–5 weeks]The workflow goes live with your team trained on the review process, then moves into continuous monitoring and tuning.
[2–3 weeks, then ongoing]The first deployed workflow is scoped to land inside the first 90 days. Expansion into additional workflows, divisions, or estimation domains happens after that first workflow is holding in production.
Architecture and ownership
Every Razorback engine is deliberately modular. Ingestion, orchestration, knowledge storage, business rules, output generation, and dashboards are separated, so Pinnacia can replace any single backend provider without rebuilding the business logic that makes your estimates yours.
Pricing structure
We publish the price of the blueprint because it is the only number we can know before we have seen your documents. Everything after it is quoted from what the blueprint finds, at a fixed price, once.
We interview your estimators, read your real bid documents, and map how work actually moves from invitation to submitted number — including the exceptions your senior people carry in their heads and have never written down.
Rules capture, workflow configuration, testing against your historical bids, and deployment. Priced as one fixed number, not an hourly estimate that moves.
The range across engagements is wide, and honestly so — a two-format subcontractor and a multi-division fabricator are not the same job. The blueprint is what closes that gap before you are asked to commit to anything.
Maintenance, tuning, quality review, monitoring, support for your team, and model and vendor updates as the underlying tooling changes.
Compute and processing costs are included in the monthly figure. You get one predictable number, not a bill that moves with how many jobs you bid.
No seat licenses. No per-user pricing. No usage meter. You are paying for a built and maintained engine, and the monthly is what keeps it accurate.
Questions we get
Estimating software gives everyone the same structure to work inside. It still waits for a person to read the documents, decide the scope, and apply judgment. A Razorback engine encodes that judgment — your assumptions, your pricing structure, your exceptions — so the first pass is produced for you and your estimators move to review and strategy. It can sit alongside your existing platform rather than replace it.
Historical bid packages and the estimates you produced from them, your current pricing structure or cost basis, and access to the people who make the judgment calls. It does not need to be clean. Messy but recoverable is normal, and organizing it is part of the build.
Your team does. Your engine produces a structured, priced estimate with confidence flags, and your estimator approves, adjusts, or rejects it. You set the thresholds that force review — typically a confidence floor plus a dollar-value trigger. Nothing goes out under your name without a human approving it.
Corrections are the feedback loop. When your reviewer changes a line, Pinnacia traces it back to the rule or extraction step that caused it and fixes the cause, not the symptom. That tuning is what the retainer pays for. Expect the first weeks after deployment to involve more correction than month six.
You own the inputs that matter: your data, your documented rules, your schemas, and the outputs your engine produces. Pinnacia builds, hosts, and maintains the Razorback engine itself under the engagement, and it is yours alone — engines are not shared between clients. Specific ownership and exit terms are written into the agreement so there is no ambiguity later — see the engagement terms for the current framework.
Because a free proposal would be a guess, and you would be the one carrying the risk of it being wrong. The work in a blueprint is real work — sitting with your estimators, reading your actual bid packages, and finding the judgment calls nobody has ever written down. That is what lets us quote a fixed price for the build instead of an hourly range that moves once we are inside.
The chart and the process map are yours to keep either way, whether or not you build anything with us. If you do go ahead within 90 days, the $4,500 comes off the price of the build in full.
That is expected, and it is why a Razorback engine is modular. Backend providers sit behind your business logic, not inside it. When we swap one out for cost, accuracy, or availability reasons, your workflow and rules stay where they are. You should barely notice.
The heaviest lift is discovery and rules capture, when we need real access to the person who knows how you price. Pinnacia does the documentation work. Plan on roughly [X hours/week] from an internal owner during the build, dropping to [X hours/month] once the workflow is live. You make the calls; we write them down and encode them.
Usually the highest-volume, most repetitive bid type you handle — the one where the documents look similar every time and your estimators are doing recognizable work over and over. It is rarely your most complex job. We pick it together in discovery based on volume, repeatability, and how much senior time it consumes.
Next step
The Razorback engine, built and maintained by Pinnacia. A discovery call is a working conversation: your bid volume, where the queue backs up, and what the first workflow would be. If it is not a fit, we will say so on the call.