Guthrie AI secures $4M led by Chicago Ventures to automate contractor workflows

A Philly AI startup working to improve construction workflows raised a seed round to expand its team. 

Guthrie AI, a platform that helps trade contractors put together job proposals, landed a $4 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures. The company will use the capital to scale its engineering and product teams and develop new integrations, CEO and cofounder Ted Baumgardner told Technical.ly. 

“A couple months ago, [we] decided that the amount of demand that we had been receiving from the market, we couldn’t keep up with,” he said. “We really needed to find some capital partners to help us invest in the infrastructure to expand what we were doing.”

Guthrie AI currently employs 12 people in the United States alongside a handful of international team members. Baumgardner aims to expand the company’s local footprint by adding six more Philly-based roles. 

Traditionally, when trade contractors receive project blueprints, they have to wade through massive documents covering the entire job. The startup uses AI to organize contractor communications, summarize project details and extract only the information relevant to a specific trade.

The goal is to centralize project information and support the bidding process, Baumgardner said. 

Building tech to address challenges in the family business

Originally from South Jersey, Baumgardner was first exposed to the construction industry through his parents. His dad started a general contracting company and his mom ran a glass and glazing business. 

After he left the Marine Corps in 2021, Baumgardner went to the University of Pennsylvania to get a combined law degree and MBA. While he was in grad school, he started working with his mom. 

He learned that trade contractors, who specialize in certain construction tasks, spend a lot of time responding to opportunities to pitch their services to general contractors.

Working in the glass trade, he experienced the friction firsthand, communicating between suppliers and general contractors while trying to build accurate project quotes under tight deadlines.

“Through structure you can generate a lot of efficiency by getting all the right information,” he said. “So [contractors] can spend their time doing the important things, interacting with the clients … ultimately winning more profitable work.” 

After graduating from school in 2023, Baumgardner went all in on Guthrie AI and brought on his cofounder, Tuneer De, in 2025. The company bootstrapped for the first year and did a small friends-and-family round a few months ago. 

Baumgardner hopes to look back in a year and see revenue grow from $2 million to $20 million, ultimately turning Guthrie AI into an industry staple.

Baumgardner is committed to making that happen in Philly. While tech hubs like New York or San Francisco boast denser talent pools, Baumgardner is confident Philly has what the company needs to scale.

As the company grows, his hope is that people will want to move to Philly to work for Guthrie AI. 

“The vision,” Baumgardner said, “is to be a generational company in Philadelphia.”