Start me up: Nestimate

Justin Stanton

Editor, DC+

1 June 2026

Want your QS team to work more efficiently, handling data from disparate sources with greater accuracy? Perhaps Nestimate has the answer.

Ahead of appearing at Digital Construction Week (DCW) in the Start-Up Village, Armin Aghili, CEO of Nestimate, tells DC+ about his startup.

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

Armin Aghili: The commercial side of pre-construction is slow and misses critical information – and both cost real money. An estimator spends about 3.5 days pricing a single project, then loses four out of five bids. And because the price is built from scattered, incomplete information, risks that should have been caught upfront only surface once the job is on site, as variations and blown margins.

A lot of that is the inputs. Construction is the second-least digitised industry in the world, so the estimator rarely gets all the inputs, and rarely in a clean format. They get a scanned pdf that’s really a flat image, a WhatsApp message with a voice note, photos snapped onsite, and sometimes paper plans. The data is real, but trapped in formats even frontier AI models can’t read reliably, so someone rekeys it by hand and hopes nothing slips through. Pre-construction needs answers that are auditable, not just plausible.

That’s what we built Nestimate for. Our ingestion layer reads the messy inputs others break on, and works even better with clean vector data. Behind it, our own agent architecture routes each task to a specialist model with reviewers checking the work, and the commercial maths is calculated and traceable, not generated. We also turn European Space Agency satellite data into site intelligence that flags ground-truth risks before they become variations.

Crucially, the human stays in the loop: what took 3.5 days lands in minutes, then the estimator reviews and finalises in about an hour. The output is takeoffs, BOQs, bills of materials and a priced estimate that covers labour and margin, with variations coming next. For enterprises, the same engine is available via API, with our developers building or embedding it in-house, all zero retention, so it’s their own IP.

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

Our users today are contractors, QS firms and architects. The platform is focused on residential construction right now, with the commercial side for energy and data centres coming next.

The clearest result is time. Take-offs and pricing that used to take days come back in minutes. Terry Rowles at the QS firm Avenue Cost Consultancy says it saves him hours on every residential project. Kira Ariskina at KAR Studio says it’s fast and practical for real architectural work, not theoretical cost modelling. Fatmir Cekoja at Xtra says the rates are solid enough to put straight into client proposals. And it’s already helping customers win projects, which is the point: not faster admin, but more bids out the door and more of them won.

We also work with an engineering firm where we’ve deployed the same engine, trained and tuned to their needs. It reads their schemas and flags the information they’re missing, graded high, medium and low priority, so they can tell their own clients exactly what’s absent before it becomes a problem. Same engine, shaped to one customer’s output.

What’s your senior management team’s background?

My background is deep tech: over a decade taking products from zero to one across defence, civil engineering and entertainment, mostly in computer vision and immersive tech, with first-of-a-kind projects in the UK and globally for clients like Costain, PwC and Alton Towers. At Nestimate, I run strategy, product and go-to-market.

Daniel Szweda, our co-founder, is the CTO. He’s a full-stack and cloud AI engineer with over a decade leading engineering teams and turning prototypes into secure, scalable products used by millions. He owns our core engine and the capture workflows, and previously delivered an AI and AR platform funded by the European Space Agency and Innovate UK, now deployed in travel and entertainment.

Tim Phillips is our quantity surveying adviser and brings the construction depth. He’s a QS with almost 40 years on commercial and residential projects, covering everything from pre-construction to project variations, at firms like Willmott Dixon and Morgan Sindall. He keeps our outputs honest against how estimators actually work.