Zander Schweitzer has been around construction for as long as he can remember.
He celebrated his fifth birthday in the back of a bulldozer at the Port of Brisbane. His dad is a civil engineer. Before university, Zander was already out on site driving dump trucks and bulldozers. Later, as a Site Engineer with Brady Marine & Civil, he saw up close how projects really run: the pressure, the coordination, the moving parts and, quietly underneath it all, the mountain of admin that keeps everything moving.
That last part stuck with him.
For all the scale, complexity and importance of construction, so much of the industry still runs on manual paperwork. Contracts, reports, management plans, safety documentation, compliance records; critical work, but often painfully repetitive. Skilled people spend hours jumping between Word documents, templates, folders and disconnected tools, doing work that feels essential but shouldn’t take nearly as long as it does.
Zander knew there had to be a better way.
“I lived the frustration of spending hours on paperwork that I knew could be done in minutes with AI; watching skilled people burn time on admin instead of actually building.”
The insight: construction has been left behind
At the same time, he was watching AI transform other document-heavy industries. Legal. Healthcare. Entire workflows were being automated at scale. Construction, the industry responsible for building the world around us, still runs on Word documents, shared drives and manual processes.
That insight became Alloovium: an AI-powered platform that helps construction teams find answers fast and cut admin work. Instead of digging through folders or chasing down the latest version of a document, teams can ask a question and get a clear, cited answer instantly.
Finding the right counterpart
The product idea was only one half of the story. The other half was finding the right person to build it with.
Zander was introduced to Cielo Nicolosi through a mutual connection, former Startmate team member Niel Reitmann. He wasn’t originally looking at Cielo as a co-founder. He simply wanted an intro to someone technical who might be a fit. Instead, after seeing Zander’s first scrappy demo, Cielo saw the opportunity immediately.
A computer science dropout who had been coding since he was eight and had already achieved a successful exit by 15, Cielo came from a completely different world. No construction background. No years spent on site. But where Zander brought deep industry knowledge and product vision, Cielo brought the technical horsepower to build something real.
“I didn’t go to Cielo looking for a co-founder,” Zander says. “I showed him my first scrappy demo and something clicked for him.”
That combination has become one of Alloovium’s greatest strengths. Zander understands the problem because he has lived it. Cielo understands how to turn that insight into a product that can scale. Neither could have built Alloovium alone.
From scrappy demo to real product
They only went full-time in December 2025. In the four months since, they’ve moved fast. What started as an industry-validated demo that didn’t yet work has become a functioning product that integrates with tools like SharePoint, pulls in live project files, surfaces information with citations showing exactly where it came from, and can populate company templates in minutes rather than hours. Users can even create their own workflows by describing the task they want completed.
That speed matters. But what matters more is that customers are already pulling them forward.
Alloovium recently onboarded its first pilot customer, with more in the pipeline and growing interest from across the industry. The turning point, Zander says, came when the team stopped reacting to every piece of feedback and started listening for patterns.
“For a while, customer feedback was pulling us in a thousand different directions. But when we stepped back and distilled it all down, it became undeniable. Construction teams didn’t want more features, they wanted relief from admin, especially the endless grind of Word documents and Microsoft-based workflows.”
“The moment we leaned into that, interest in the product skyrocketed,” Zander says.
Building what construction teams actually need
Alloovium is still early, but the direction is clear.
What started as a way to draft documents faster is becoming something much bigger: the place teams go to find answers, generate outputs and keep projects moving, without jumping between tools.
In the next 12 months, the team plans to reach $1M ARR and onboard 75 partner companies, working toward becoming the exclusive AI partner for the world’s largest construction firms.
It’s a big ambition, but it starts with something simple: giving time back to the people actually building. And in an industry as large and foundational as construction, even small shifts in how work gets done can have an outsized impact.
Because for Zander and Cielo, this isn’t just about writing documents faster — it’s about changing how construction work gets done.
The ask
If you work in construction as a contractor, builder, project manager, architect, engineer, or consultant, and you're tired of drowning in admin, we want to hear from you. We're actively onboarding pilot customers right now, and we'd love to put Alloovium in front of you, get your feedback, and build this together with the people who feel the problem every single day.
If you're an investor or connector who sees what we see, that construction is one of the last great industries waiting to be transformed by AI, let's talk. We're building something that has the potential to become the operating system for the entire AEC world, and we're looking for the right people around the table as we scale.
If you're world-class at what you do, whether that's engineering, sales, design, operations, or anything else, and you're looking for a founding-team opportunity at a startup with serious momentum, we want to know about you. We're not looking for people who want a job, we're looking for people who want to help build something that they will look back on an be incredibly proud of.
Check them out at www.alloovium.com or watch a demo here.
Watch them pitch at Demo Day
When: Thursday, 30 April @ 7:00 PM (pre-party starting at 5 PM)
Where: Carriageworks (at the close of Blackbird's Sunrise Festival)
What: Pitch night (19 companies)
Tickets: Grab your ticket here
