Marian and Austin Pulford at a conference where Kestrel Labs software launched earlier this month. (Courtesy Kestrel)
When Marian Pulford was the development director for the RiNo Art District, the former painter got a firsthand peek inside city and state permitting.
“My husband is a licensed architect, and I was talking to him while I was going through that process about why it was so difficult,” she said of building out the now-open RiNo Art Park. “He was like, ‘Yeah, that’s just how it is. It just sucks.’”
“And everyone is just OK with that? People just think that this is fine?” Pulford asked him. “And he was like, ‘Well, no one likes it, but we accept it.’”
The couple’s company, Kestrel Labs, aims to change that, offering artificial intelligence software that integrates into the 3D-model programs architects and engineers already use. While drawing plans for a restaurant, residential home or a data center, they can check that everything is up to local code.
“We check the entire building in about 30 seconds … and then show you every error,” CEO Pulford said. “You can go in and make changes right there. You can ask our AI for an explanation of why this is wrong, what code sections it comes from and how do I fix it?”
Those types of errors can lead to weeks, months or even years of delays. Kestrel can be used to check against the 80% of existing municipal codes that are more black and white, Pulford said. The remaining 20% are more ambiguous and better for humans to interpret.
“Architects are spending up to 20% of their time a week doing these activities,” she said of code compliance. “So we are saving each individual architect multiple hours a week, and when you compound that across every architect working on a project across the months and years of the project itself, it is a very significant amount of money that is being saved.”
Pulford founded Kestrel in late 2024. Since then, it has been used by several dozen customers on hundreds of projects, she said. The firm recently raised $2.2 million, led by Chicago’s New Stack Ventures with contributions from local firms Denver Ventures and FirstMile Ventures.
Firms sign annual contracts for unlimited use of the software. Pulford said pricing is based on the size of a company and the types of projects they work on.
“A 10-person firm in Frederick, Colorado, doing mostly residential work has a very different compliance picture than a multinational firm with 6,000 architects working on data centers and concert halls,” she said.
“We are not out here charging more than the software that architects use to design, but it costs more than a ChatGPT subscription,” she added.
Most customers are in Colorado, but architects in Florida, California, New York and Illinois also use Kestrel software. She said she is also in early talks with municipalities to get Kestrel integrated into their processes as well.
Pulford said she’ll use the new investor money to add staffers to Kestrel’s nine-person team, which has office space downtown at 18th and California.
The Denver native, whose parents still live in the same Wash Park house she grew up in, studied art in Vermont before going into digital marketing and eventually helping to raise $5 million to build the RiNo Art Park.
She sees Kestrel, which is named after the small falcon that catches its prey by hovering close to the ground, as a data company that can be used across all phases of construction, not just code compliance. But that grander vision is years down the line.
“To become that company, we have to do this thing really, really, really well first,” she said. “So we don’t really talk about the long-term vision of the company because you have to earn that.”
Max has been a BusinessDen reporter since October 2024. He is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire and can be reached at max@businessden.com
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