At Caricaco Ventures, we believe in empowering Central American founders building world-class technology to solve global problems, wherever they are in the world. Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Gaudi AI, the company building the AI back office for construction.
Gaudi is reimagining how construction companies operate by turning messy project information into finished, send-ready work. Starting with estimating, one of the industry’s most time-consuming and revenue-critical workflows, the company is helping contractors bid more work, move faster, and grow without adding headcount.
What is Gaudi AI?
Founded in 2025 by Harvard Business School classmates Sebastian Piedra Rodriguez and Begum Cital, Gaudi is building AI operators that complete back-office work for construction companies.
General contractors already manage projects through blueprints, emails, PDFs, photos, phone calls, text messages, and handwritten notes. Instead of asking customers to adopt another software platform, Gaudi works with the information they already have and transforms it into finished deliverables that are ready to review and send.
Unlike traditional SaaS companies, Gaudi follows an outcome-based business model: customers pay for completed work, not software seats.
The company is launching with estimating because it is one of construction’s highest-value workflows, with plans to expand into bid leveling, scheduling, procurement, change orders, and other critical back-office operations.
Why did we invest?
«Sebastian and Begum are exactly the kind of founders we look for: technical enough to build the product, and close enough to the problem to know it cold. Sebastian built experience around construction and real estate in Costa Rica, so he’s not guessing at the pain point, he’s lived it. Begum scaled real companies and knows how to turn a good idea into something that actually ships. Construction is a $13 trillion industry still buried in PDFs and phone calls, and most of what’s been built for it is just more software to manage. Gaudi does the opposite: it gets the work done and hands it back finished. Founding teams like this, where the pieces genuinely complement each other, are rare, and it’s exactly what we look for.» – Melissa Guevara, Principal at Caricaco Ventures.
The problem
Construction is a $13 trillion industry, yet its back office still runs on manual work.
General contractors make critical decisions using information scattered across blueprints, emails, PDFs, text messages, photos, calls, and handwritten notes. That information is fragmented, constantly changing, and difficult for traditional software to process.
Estimating is one of the clearest examples. For small and mid-sized contractors, growth is often constrained by paperwork—not demand. Contractors often spend 2 to 14 days and more than $450 in skilled labor preparing a single bid, even though they typically need to submit five bids to win one project.
The solution
Gaudi transforms messy, unstructured project information into finished, review-ready work.
Gaudi works like a teammate embedded directly in the conversation. Contractors just CC Gaudi on the emails and project threads they use day to day and Gaudi captures what it needs, asks questions proactively if anything is missing, and delivers completed work in minutes.
Because the platform was purpose-built for construction workflows, customers don’t need to learn new software, manually organize data, or change how they already work.
Gaudi also provides traceable calculations and auditable assumptions, allowing contractors to confidently review every estimate before sending it to a client.
Beyond estimating, contractors can use Gaudi to update pricing as projects evolve, collect subcontractor bids, manage schedules, respond to clients faster, and dramatically reduce the administrative burden of running their business.
“Gaudi AI redefines the future of construction and the world post AI. I see a world where every construction company in the world runs their back office work with “Gaudi operators”” – Sebastian Piedra Rodriguez, Co-Founder & CEO.
The vision
Gaudi believes the construction industry is moving beyond software tools toward AI operators that complete work directly.
“Gaudi is the future of work for contractors. We want to be the right hand they never had; a system that understands their business, handles the back office work, and gives them more time to be on the job site building the world around us.” – Begum Cital, Co-Founder & COO.
Market opportunity
Gaudi’s initial market is the U.S. small and medium-sized general contractor segment: companies with fewer than ten employees that represent more than 80% of all U.S. contracting businesses.
More than 920,000 residential and commercial contractors manage multi-million-dollar projects while still relying on emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, phone calls, and text messages to run their operations.
After proving value in this underserved market, Gaudi plans to expand into larger general contractors, real estate developers, and subcontractors.
Traction
Although the company was incorporated in late 2025, Gaudi has already achieved significant early milestones:
- Its pre-seed fundraising round is oversubscribed.
- The company has hired its first engineer and is actively expanding its engineering team in Costa Rica.
- Early customers across the United States are already validating the platform’s ability to reduce both the time and cost of estimating.
Customer feedback highlights the impact of the product:
- «Turning an estimate into a contract is still manual. We’re basically copy-pasting everything into Word.»
- «Every day I don’t show up at the field costs me $500+.»
- «I can finally stop counting doors manually on every single bid.»
- «I have five estimates to get done. I’ll probably be up at three in the morning to work on those (pre-Gaudi).»
- «I tried using ChatGPT and Claude, but could not fully trust the numbers. With Gaudi, I like that I know where the numbers are coming from.»
Meet the founders
Gaudi was founded by Sebastian Piedra Rodriguez and Begum Cital, who met at Harvard Business School in 2023 and spent three years building together before launching the company.
Sebastian, from Costa Rica, combines backgrounds in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics with experience developing AI systems at Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Beecker. He also founded and operates a successful real estate business in Costa Rica, giving him firsthand operational experience.
Begum, originally from Turkey, helped scale AdTheorent from Series A to its NASDAQ IPO, leading analytics, AI product development, operations, and cross-functional execution. She also renovated and managed real estate projects, gaining firsthand insight into the coordination challenges and operational complexity of construction.
Why Caricaco Ventures?
«Sebastian, our co-founder and CEO, is from Costa Rica and had long known Caricaco Ventures as one of Latin America’s leading venture firms. As we began building our technology team in Costa Rica, we wanted more than capital. We wanted a partner with deep regional understanding and the global perspective to help us scale. Caricaco was the right fit on both fronts.» – Gaudi AI
What’s next?
Gaudi’s next milestone is launching its production-grade Estimator Agent with its first commercial customers. From there, the company will expand into adjacent back-office workflows, including bid leveling, scheduling, procurement, and change orders.
Its long-term vision is simple but ambitious: a future where construction companies no longer manage software tools, instead, they rely on AI operators that complete the work itself.
Learn more
To learn more about Gaudi AI, visit https://heygaudi.ai/. or LinkedIn: gaudiai