Mary Janine L. Kamenić
Julianna Widlund P.E
Stevan Lukic CEng
On 2 September, at the ConTech Summit during International Built Environment Week, Civils.ai was announced as the Gold Winner of the inaugural APAC Pitch Day of the Construction Startup Competition. It is the first Gold Winner title awarded in the 2026 edition of the competition, and the first time the programme has run a dedicated Asia-Pacific stage.
The award was presented by Jesús Ortiz, Head of Cemex Ventures, and Mr Alvin Tan, Singapore's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and National Development. You can read the announcements from Cemex Ventures and the Building and Construction Authority of Singapore.
What the Gold Winner title includes
A €10,000 cash prize sponsored by Meta, a place in the competition's Top 30, a shot at the Global Finals, and access to the partner network behind the programme.
A competition at record scale
Now in its tenth edition, the Construction Startup Competition is run by Cemex Ventures alongside Caterpillar, Dysruptek by Haskell, Ferrovial, Hilti, Leonard by VINCI, NOVA by Saint-Gobain, Trimble and Zacua Ventures, with BCA supporting the Asia-Pacific stage. This year the programme drew close to 800 applications from more than 60 countries — roughly a 40% jump on 2025 — and 243 of those came from startups across APAC. Applications from Asia and Oceania grew 181% year on year, which says a lot about where construction technology is being built right now.
Judging spans five focus areas: preconstruction technology, jobsite productivity and building systems, climate technology for the built world, smart manufacturing and logistics, and smart buildings and infrastructure. Civils.ai competed in preconstruction.
What we pitched
Our pitch was about the part of a project that quietly eats the most time: reading the documents. Civils.ai is an AI platform for preconstruction that runs quantity takeoffs and cross-checks drawings, specifications, contracts and geotechnical reports against each other — the repetitive, error-prone review work that estimators and engineers do by hand today. Teams using it cut takeoff time by as much as 90%, and catch discrepancies between documents early, while there is still time and budget to deal with them.
The jury's feedback pointed to the same thing we hear from customers: the value is not in generic AI, but in a system that understands how construction documents actually behave — where information contradicts itself, where it is missing, and where a small misread turns into a claim months later.
The five APAC finalists
Five regional track winners pitched in Singapore, covering preconstruction, site productivity and low-carbon materials:
- Arbel.ai — turns drone footage into searchable site intelligence with planned-versus-actual visibility.
- Civils.ai — an AI co-pilot for civil engineers that extracts and cross-checks project documents.
- ConcreteAI — IoT sensors that monitor in-situ concrete strength and temperature in real time.
- Bton.io — patented low-clinker mixes that sharply reduce the carbon footprint of concrete.
- LIGHTYX — laser projection that puts BIM models directly onto floors, walls and ceilings.
Why Singapore mattered for this one
Running the first APAC Pitch Day here was deliberate. Singapore has been building the conditions that construction technology companies need in order to get past the pilot stage — access to real sites, buyers willing to adopt, and public agencies working alongside industry rather than at arm's length. For a company like ours, that combination is the difference between an interesting demo and a product that ships on live projects.
The competition now moves on to its remaining two Pitch Days, in Las Vegas and in Helsinki during RecoTech, where the other Gold Winner titles will be decided.
Thank you
Thank you to Cemex Ventures and every partner on the jury, to BCA and the IBEW team for hosting, and to the other finalists — the standard on stage was high. Most of all, thank you to the engineers, estimators and contractors who use Civils.ai every day and tell us, bluntly, what needs to work better. This award belongs to that feedback loop.
Read the official announcements
- Cemex Ventures: Civils.ai named APAC Gold Winner of Construction Startup Competition 2026
- BCA Singapore: Winner of the inaugural Asia Pacific edition of the world's largest competition for construction start-ups
See what won
If your team is spending weeks on takeoffs and document reviews, we would like to show you the shorter version of that process.
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