Roundhouse Labs Enters Market with Architect AI for RFIs and Submittals
Architect AI for RFI and Submittals Unites the Project Team with Procore Integration
Artificial intelligence (AI) for requests for information (RFIs) and submittals has been an active space, with solution providers ranging from project management software vendors to customer relationship management vendors to estimating vendors, augmenting their core functionality with tools that automate the generation, management and response to RFIs, and the underlying specifications, and field observations.
But most of these products focus on meeting the needs of construction contractors rather than architects. Atlanta-based Roundhouse Labs meanwhile focuses on the needs of architects, going the extra mile by integrating with the Procore project of the general contractor to automate construction automation tasks during construction, including submittals, while capturing for the architect project metrics like delays, bottlenecks, and project team performance.
Like so many software and AI products in the industry, Roundhouse was created by and then spun out of an organization doing work in the space. Roundhouse CEO and Founder Tim Douglas comes from a background with Procore and leading construction sector sales for low-code platform Quickbase. But the solution itself spun out of Praxis3, which had been using it for construction administration for years.
“One thing that seems to move architects onto the platform is the efficiency of not having to log into Procore,” Douglas said on our August 11, 2026 briefing.
Emerging Architecture AI
Other products handle some or all of these functions for contractors, including tools embedded in project management, CRM, estimating and bidding.
But in order to solve problems for architects, AI data models for construction administration (CA) must be fundamentally structured around the differing legal liabilities, operational workflows, and risk profiles of architects versus contractors. While both parties interact with RFIs and submittals, an architect’s system must prioritize design intent compliance and liability protection, whereas a contractor’s system must prioritize execution, cost management, and schedule impact.
“Roundhouse was built to be a platform to manage the process, the communication flow of construction administration,” Douglas said. “And one of the things that really attracted me to it beyis that Roundhouse figured out the way that they structure their data out of the gate. You know, Procore, Autodesk, virtually every project platform in AEC takes a project-centric view and goes deep on a project the way a contractor would experience it.
“Roundhouse started and structures their data in the way an architecture firm uses the data at the firm, at the studio, at the client, and at the project. And in that way, you can roll up and roll down information and visibility across studios, across projects, across client work, depending on where you operate in the firm. And so, I thought that that was really interesting. And so, one of the big things that we've been working on for the past several months, it's live now, is a bi-directional bridge with Procore to bring RFIs and submittals into Roundhouse.”
Roundhouse's Current Functionality and Features on the Roadmap
Roundhouse currently provides a portal-based workflow that helps customers manage the RFI and submittal process without repeatedly logging into Procore and manually managing the workflow from incoming requests through resolution. The application is already delivering a measurable productivity benefit by simplifying this process and providing customers with a more effective way to manage information across projects.
AI elements of the product, according to Douglas, become usable by an architecture firm as project history accumulates. Currently, only data from within the customer organization informs the AI functionality—it does not accumulate learnings from across the Roundhouse customer base. The more RFIs and submittals that flow through a Roundhouse user instance, and the more projects a customer adds, the more data becomes available to reinforce the intelligence that Roundhouse can provide. This creates a potentially important network effect at the individual customer level: greater usage produces more project data, which in turn increases the value of the platform.
Today, some aspects of the customer experience are still manual. Douglas specifically notes that users can perform a data export, although not yet in JSON format, and manually spin up a customer portal in approximately 15 minutes. This suggests that automation of data provisioning, portal creation and potentially API/JSON-based data exchange are areas of development as Roundhouse moves beyond its early-customer phase.
It’s still early days for Roundhouse, and Douglas said he expects to land another six to eight pilots before the end of the year and is using those deployments to demonstrate the portal, validate the productivity gains and accumulate the RFI and submittal data that strengthens the platform's intelligence.
Who is Roundhouse For?
Roundhouse will be a fit for construction organizations that already use Procore and have significant volumes of RFIs and submittals to manage. The value proposition is particularly relevant to organizations where these workflows create substantial administrative overhead, because Roundhouse can reduce the need to repeatedly enter Procore and manually manage information from the initial request through resolution.
The presence of multiple projects is another important characteristic of the ideal customer. That suggests Roundhouse is likely to have greater long-term value for architecture organizations with recurring project activity rather than companies managing only an occasional project.
Apart from project volume, architects adopting Roundhouse will need a certain psychographic profile—specifically, their leadership must be interested in doing things their competitors are not in order to gain a competitive advantage.
Risk of adoption is lower than it would be for a central transactional system like ERP or an application that requires an architecture firm to completely revise its business model. AI for design causes the bill-by-the-hour model to fail, and some design AI firms like Cove, have seen founders starting their own architecture firm as a proof point for the product.
This makes Roundhouse attractive, low-hanging fruit for architecture firms intent on using AI to increase competitiveness and margin. AI for design and iteration replaces billable core hours upon which fees are calculated, requiring a drastically different business model and changing the structure of an organization and the relationship with the project owner. Roundhouse simply eliminates non-value-added work, freeing up staff to contribute in more meaningful ways.
Roundhouse Pricing Strategy
Roundhouse's current pricing strategy is clearly designed around a low-friction pilot-to-paid conversion model. The company is offering a 60-day free trial that allows a customer to put the platform on a project, experience the portal and begin seeing the resulting data and productivity benefits before making a paid commitment.
The free trial also serves a enables product validation in each customer organization Because Roundhouse's intelligence becomes more valuable as more RFIs and submittals pass through the system, the trial gives the company an opportunity to establish the platform within a customer's workflow while simultaneously building the data foundation that can demonstrate its value.
Douglas said that in turn, these productivity benefits, which increase as more projects are added, will make the job of converting free accounts to paid customers.
“We have a decent pipeline of paid pilots, and each pilot includes this built-in motivation to drive that expansion, which is helpful to us,” Douglas said. “We can spin their portal up for a customer in 15 minutes, and then they are in a position to gain a real and meaningful advantage.”
BOTTOM LINE: Project owners are already expecting architects to lower fees thanks to supposed AI-driven efficiencies. The industry itself will have to change before AI can become a core value generator in design. But products like Roundhouse will give architecture firms a less disruptive way to drive efficiencies right now. This bodes well for them. Roundhouse also gives architects a tool designed specifically for their sector that will lock into existing workflows and shepherd processes through the business as opposed to a standalone tool that extracts data from documents.
Given where Roundhouse Labs is in its company and product lifecycle, architects will need more than an adequate flow of projects—they will need leadership that knows if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. This is a real early adopter opportunity for progressive firms.
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