Start me up: CodelessAI

Justin Stanton

Editor, DC+

29 May 2026

Want to centralise every variation to a contract and the evidence associated with it? Perhaps CodelessAI has a solution for you.

A screen grab of CodelessAI. Image: CodelessAI — Image: CodelessAI

Ahead of appearing at Digital Construction Week (DCW) in the Start-Up Village, Lubomir Malo, founder and CEO of CodelessAI, tells DC+ about his startup.

DC+: You’ve got two minutes: what problem does your technology solve and how does it do it?

Lubomir Malo: Two numbers frame the problem. ServiceTitan’s 2026 industry report found that change orders add 5%-20% to project value for most firms – variations are a high-volume, high-value part of the commercial workflow. At the same time, RICS reported that nine-in-ten surveyors say their work is being affected by skills shortages, with quantity surveying one of the two most acute shortage areas in the industry.

Put those together and the picture is clear: variation volumes are high, they carry significant cost impact and the people qualified to interrogate them are stretched thin. When commercial teams are over-stretched, due diligence is the first thing to suffer – variations get processed faster, with less time to challenge entitlement or costs. That’s where profit in construction leaks. On 1%-3% margins, even a small share of mis-priced or un-entitled claims compounds into a real hit on project margin. Multiple contractors even told us that a single badly-handled subcontract account can wipe out the profit on the whole project.

The challenge isn’t tracking variations and instruction, many contractors have systems to log them. It’s the due diligence layer. Working out whether a claim is contractually entitled, properly evidenced and consistent with what’s been agreed elsewhere is detailed, document-heavy work that still runs largely on emails, PDFs and contract appendices, with most of the analysis happening in the QS’s head.

CodelessAI is purpose-built for this. We centralise every variation with the contract it sits under and the evidence around it. Our AI reads the relevant clauses, locates the supporting correspondence, and produces a structured assessment of each claim – flagging duplicates, gaps in entitlement, and approaching deadlines. We don’t replace commercial teams, we supercharge them – we handle the due diligence to allow people to focus on the commercial judgement. And commercial directors get real-time visibility into cost exposure across their portfolio, instead of waiting on monthly reporting cycles.

OK, you’ve got my attention: who’s tested or already using your tech and what are the results?

Our first customer is TClarke, a top 100 UK contractor. We started co-designing the product with them in December, signed the first contract in February, and went live on real project data in early April across two of their major projects.

Before signing, we ran our analysis across a sample of real variations from active TClarke projects. The proof of concept demonstrated clear value – surfacing contestable exposure that would have been difficult to catch in real time across the claim volumes a tier 1 commercial team handles. TClarke recognised that having a single source of truth for variations would support timely review, give both them and their supply chain consistency and accuracy in cost forecasting and make final account negotiations more straightforward with significantly less opportunity for dispute or ADR.

What’s really stood out is TClarke’s appetite to lead on this. Their initiative here isn’t just about one project – it’s about strengthening and formalising their relationships with both their existing and new supply chain partners. This is still in its early stages within the business, but it’s already being rolled out progressively and the ambition is clear.

In the coming weeks we’ll be on-boarding subcontractors directly onto the platform – closing the loop end-to-end. Every variation submitted directly into the system, evidenced against the contract and visible to both sides from day one. That’s a meaningful shift in how a tier 1 contractor and its supply chain can operate together.

What’s your senior management team’s background?

We’re a team of AI and enterprise software experts, backed by senior construction collaborators who keep us grounded in how this work actually gets done.

I was director of product at Meta across ads, data infrastructure and AI and a direct contributor to the Llama 3 and Llama 4 foundation models. Before that, between my two stints at Meta, I was VP product at Causaly, a startup deploying AI into large pharmaceutical companies. I’ve spent my career building production AI systems that have to work in complex, high-stakes environments – which is what contractors need from any technology supporting critical commercial decisions.

Our founding CTO, Alaa, has been lead engineer at multiple technology companies, including SaaS startups in regulated industries. He builds the production-grade, secure systems that tier 1 contractors can run on.

We’ve also built relationships with senior commercial leaders from tier 1 contractors to help guide our product design and customer conversations, keeping us honest about what commercial teams actually need.

The depth of our partnership with TClarke is the best evidence that the combination works.