Start me up: SmartStruct
18 May 2026
What’s Stiimo doing with QTOs at Digital Construction Week?
19 May 2026
Ahead of exhibiting at Digital Construction Week (DCW), Stiimo founder and product expert Joel Åhlén tells DC+ what show visitors can expect on the firm’s stand.
DC+: Who are you and what do you do?
Joel Åhlén: I’m one of the co-founders of Stiimo, and I lead our product work. We’re a Swedish team reinventing how quantity takeoffs get done in installation work, mainly electrical today, with VS (mechanical and plumbing) coming next.
Estimators have been counting symbols and measuring cable runs in pdfs for decades, mostly inside the same general-purpose markup tools. It’s slow, stressful, and there can be big consequences if you miss something. You either lose the bid or you lose money on the job. The takeoff is one of those workflows that’s been due a proper rethink for a long time.
What are you launching at DCW and what problem does it solve?
DCW is our UK launch. Stiimo has been live with Swedish estimators for a while, and we’re bringing the platform to the UK now because the underlying problem is the same on both sides of the North Sea. The drawings have changed (pdfs instead of paper), but the workflow really hasn’t. People still scroll through dozens of A1 sheets, click around, count, tally, double-check, and then redo the whole thing when a revision lands.
What Stiimo does is read the drawing the way an estimator does, but faster. It identifies symbols, measures cable and conduit lengths, structures the data, and pushes it straight into the calculation system you already use. We process most drawings in under a minute. The estimator stays in control. Nothing gets sent off without a human looking at it – we’re very deliberate about that. The job isn’t to replace the person doing the takeoff; it’s to give them back the hours they spend on the mechanical parts so they can focus on the judgement calls.
The problem we solve is simple to describe: turning unstructured drawings into structured quantities, without the painful manual middle.
Who’s tested it and what were the results?
Around 100 Swedish contractors and consultancies use Stiimo on real projects today, from solo estimators up to larger installation firms. Together they’ve run more than 9,500 drawings through the platform so far. The headline result is more than 50% time savings on the takeoff itself, particularly on cable runs and routing, which is usually the most painful part of the job.
What’s been more interesting is the kind of feedback we hear about the tool. People talk less about “AI counting symbols” and more about having one place where the drawings, the quantities and the project structure sit together. A structured portal wasn’t really our pitch when we started, but a lot of users really value that. We have customers who’ve put hundreds of drawings through Stiimo across a dozen-plus projects and built it into their daily workflow.
A few other things we hear repeatedly: most drawings come back in around 40 seconds, and it’s easier to do revisions because re-running a takeoff is cheap, and the bits the AI gets wrong are visible and easy to correct rather than hidden somewhere on sheet 23. That last point matters to us. We would rather show our working and let the estimator fix the last few percent than pretend we got everything right and miss something on a bid.
For UK customers, we’re treating DCW as the start of a conversation. Standards differ, symbol libraries differ, and we want to learn from British estimators before we tell them we’ve got it all figured out. We’re actively looking for early-access partners at the show.
What’s your stand number?
We’re at stand D54. Come and find us. We’ll have Stiimo running live on real projects so you can see exactly how it works. We’re looking for pilot partners, so if you’d like to be one of our first UK users, come and have a chat.
Keep up to date with DC+: sign up for the midweek newsletter.
Story for Digital Construction Plus? Get in touch via email:
[email protected]
