Justin White is the founder and CEO of one of our favorite early-adopter customers, K&D Landscaping. He's also the host of the Trades Talk podcast, going in-depth with visionary leaders shaping the trades.
A theme Justin brought up when we interviewed him previously was that he, "likes what Bobyard's doing—not just in what they've built, but what I know they're going to build." And this sentiment was a major throughline of the conversation he and our founder and CEO, Michael Ding, had on his latest episode of Trades Talk.
The conversation was a candid look at our product and product development philosophy, why it’s refreshing for the construction industry, but also stands out in the technology industry, too.
Below are some of our favorite insights into our process, philosophy, and success that investors watching the space, engineers evolving their careers, and contractors trying to figure out how and why to incorporate Bobyard’s AI into their process will enjoy.
The market is ready for this: from investors to customers
Early in the conversation, Michael described one of the clearest signals of product-market fit a startup can have:
"It feels like the market pulls the product out of the company. We have tons of customers, all from different angles, asking us to build this new cool thing, build that cool new thing. We just can't build fast enough." — Michael Ding
91% of demos for our new trades have converted directly into design partner customers. "It's a stupid conversion rate,” Michael laughed, “and it's just because we showed them something truly, truly special."
This pull shows up on the investor end as well. At the end of 2025, Bobyard closed what we believe to be the largest software Series A raised in construction—a $35M round that came together before we were even ready to raise. As Michael told Justin, there was no deck and no data room at the time of the first offer. The round was preempted, then quickly filled with more investors wanting in on the cap table than could be accommodated.
"I think it's a cool moment, not just for Bobyard, but for construction as a whole. Maybe finally, mainstream Silicon Valley venture capital sees the opportunity there is in the trades." — Michael Ding
The engineering bottleneck moved from execution to imagination
Justin asked how Bobyard moves so quickly across so many trades, and Michael explained that AI tooling has collapsed how long it takes to ship code. Bobyard’s engineers take days to do work that used to take a month or more. This poses a new bottleneck:
"If shipping code is no longer the limiting factor… it’s the ability to articulate and think through and envision the product you want to build. The bottleneck is your thought, not your engineering typing speed." — Michael Ding
This also allows Bobyard's to go hard and heavy on developing and investing in its proprietary computer vision to train models on each specific trade and read its drawings accurately. That depth is what an AI wrapper can't replicate, no matter how fast it can iterate on the front end.
In the age of AI, your people matter more, not less
As an AI-native company founder, people are sometimes surprised that Michael is so focused on people—whether Bobyard employees or our end-user estimators.
"In the age of AI and automation, the thing that actually matters is your people. You have to invest in them, and you give them the proper tooling." — Michael Ding
He emphasized that AI doesn’t make some less valuable, it makes them dramatically more leveraged. Both estimators and engineers who are talented at what they do and well-versed in how AI can amplify their skills can make an even bigger impact to solidify their seat at the table.
How we build our philosophy into our product
When we launched Bobyard 2.0, one major consideration was that takeoffs aren’t just another task, but a training ground to build an estimator’s career and path forward. If it becomes a black box, then we’re cutting off the next generation of construction leaders. So when we rebuilt the platform for 2.0, we made the AI workflow systematic on purpose: set up the models, tune the parameters, run them, review the output, finalize—but without adding extra time across each step.
As a Bobyard customer, Justin went further. "You're not just doing the takeoff, you're also providing a level of efficiency and productivity into the design-build phase, almost doing a decent amount of pre-construction work that a project engineer would be responsible for.”
What’s next for Bobyard’s product vision
Justin wrapped the episode asking where the product is headed next and Michael pointed to preconstruction. As one coherent set of data, every other workflow downstream flows from these numbers. So, once Bobyard can read drawings across multiple trades, an even bigger picture comes into view:
"One of the key problems in construction is collaboration across different verticals and different parties. And you only get to do that when you read drawings for everybody." — Michael Ding
Justin accurately picked up that this means breaking down “techniques from other trades that have lived in silos for decades, and apply them across the rest of the trades that never would have had access to them."
Every trade we launch makes every other trade sharper.
Bobyard's true trade secret
Bobyard’s trade secret isn't just AI, but the operating model we can build with it and behind it. The speed of our own creativity and thought process is the bottleneck, which puts in a unique position to respond faster to customer and investor insights and demands than ever before. In an industry where software development cycles can take months to years, and haven’t fundamentally changed much in decades, this is why we stand out to industry operators like Justin and beyond.
Listen to the full round-two episode of TradeStock with Justin White and Michael Ding here.
Want to see what Bobyard could do for your team? Book a demo.