Newforma has bought Lumi AI, a Toronto startup founded in 2023 whose engine answers plain-English questions about a company’s data, and it’s selling the deal as a fix for AI tools that guess. The Oct. 21 announcement didn’t disclose terms.
“Our customers don’t need another AI that sounds confident, they need answers they can verify,” Newforma CEO Peter Cannone said. Lumi co-founder Tudor Boiangiu, who joins Newforma as vice president of AI engineering, was blunter: the team “spent three years building an engine that asks instead of guessing.”
What Lumi AI adds to Newforma’s project data
Newforma, which is owned by Ethos Capital, sits on a lot of records. It says its software has supported more than 20 million projects and 4.5 million users, along with 6 million submittals and 1 billion emails. Lumi builds a semantic layer over connected systems, essentially a map of what each field and record means, so a question gets an answer with its reasoning shown.
The engine goes into Newforma’s own platforms first, drawing on issues, RFIs, submittals and correspondence. Newforma Konekt dashboards will get the analytics layer, with rollout details still to come. It’ll also feed Vojo, the AI assistant Newforma introduced at its user conference in May. Planned features include natural-language search and questions that span multiple projects.
Cannone told Construction Dive that Lumi won’t be offered to companies outside Newforma’s customer base. No layoffs are planned, and Lumi’s engineers will keep working from Toronto.
Why explainable AI answers matter to AEC firms
Every construction software vendor has an agent now. Procore’s submittal agent can update 500 submittals at once, and jobsite camera makers are wiring their AI into chat apps. Newforma’s pitch is narrower. Architecture and engineering firms already store decades of RFIs and transmittals, and the hard part isn’t generating text about them. It’s proving where an answer came from.
If a project manager asks how many RFIs on a hospital job touched fire-rated assemblies, a confident number is worthless without the records behind it. That’s the problem Lumi says it solves, and it’s the right one for firms that carry professional liability on what they sign.
The claims still need testing
Newforma hasn’t published accuracy figures, named a pilot customer or given a release date. Lumi’s boilerplate says Fortune 100 enterprises have used it to find multimillion-dollar opportunities in their data, which says little about how it handles a 15-year-old RFI log with inconsistent naming. Keeping Lumi in-house also means it only sees what lives in Newforma, and most firms’ records are spread across several systems.
“Everyone in this industry wants to be your single source of truth,” Cannone said. Firms weighing Vojo should ask for a demo on their oldest, messiest project, not the cleanest one.