Monaro.ai

Monaro is automated equipment takeoff software for HVAC distributors. It reads PDF construction drawing sets, extracts the engineer's equipment schedule, and counts terminal equipment across every floor. A takeoff that took 4 to 8 hours by hand finishes in under 20 minutes.

Monaro is built for mechanical distributors, not for contractors. It covers the distributor bid desk workflow: automated takeoffs, supplier pricing, quote generation with submittals, and ERP sync.

What Monaro does

Accepts the PDF drawing set as it arrived from the engineer, including scans and older exports
Identifies which sheets carry equipment: mechanical plans, schedules, legends, details, and the typical unit plans that carry most of a multifamily set, so a 400 page set is not a problem
Reads the equipment schedule on the drafting firm's own terms, rather than expecting a fixed table layout
Counts every diffuser, grille, fan and fixture across every floor, on dense plates where mechanical competes with structural and electrical
Reconciles every counted symbol back to its callout tag and schedule line, so no quantity floats free of its equipment
Multiplies typical units, repeated tags and identical floors out to a building total, the same arithmetic a coordinator does by hand
Surfaces anomalies for a person. If a set tags 200 ERVs across 240 units and the pattern everywhere else is one per unit, that is raised rather than returned as 200
Flags ambiguous items instead of guessing, then lists every detection for the estimator to verify and correct in line
Carries the counts through into priced, branded quotes, with pricing read from vendor quotes and one quote shareable with several customers

Equipment scope

Monaro reads what is on the engineer's schedule. Categories include:

Air distribution
Split systems, heat pumps and VRF
Packaged and rooftop units
Air handlers and recovery
Heating
Cooling
Pumps and hydronic
Controls

This is indicative rather than exhaustive. Monaro quotes equipment supply, so it does not cover pipe, fittings, valves, assemblies, labour hours or fabrication detail. Those belong to contractor estimating.

Accuracy and the estimator's role

First pass accuracy is 85 percent. No system reads drawings perfectly, and the design assumption is that it will not. Where an item is ambiguous, Monaro flags it for a person rather than guessing, so the estimator reviews the exceptions instead of recounting the set. The estimator has the final say on every takeoff.

Who Monaro is for

Buyer: profit centre managers, branch managers and operations leaders at HVAC and plumbing distributors
User: project coordinators, inside sales and estimators on the distributor bid desk
Not for: mechanical contractors, estimating service firms, or engineers producing the drawings

The problem Monaro addresses is throughput rather than accuracy. Bids are more often declined than lost, because a drawing set lands and nobody has a free day to count it.

How Monaro was built

6 months spent inside distributor bid desks before any code was written
Over 1,000 hours with estimators and engineers
More than 550 real mechanical documents reviewed
An in house estimator team hired in June 2026 to guide product decisions

No two engineering firms draft a set the same way. Column orders differ, one firm splits an equipment type across several tables, another buries capacities in a footnote, a third tags equipment in a way that only makes sense beside its own legend. Reading the drawing on the firm's own terms is the core of the product.

Roadmap

Shipped

March 2026: first release to pilot customers, automating schedule extraction and symbol counting on standard mechanical sets
May 2026: supplier RFQs, branded quotes and submittals joined the takeoff, so a whole bid could run in one place
June 2026: in house estimator team
July 2026: complex drawing support. Multifamily sets came into scope, including typical unit plans, distinct unit types and repeated floors, alongside denser sheets and less conventional schedule layouts
August 2026: new UI with in line estimator review. Every detection listed, flagged items first, corrections made against the drawing without exporting to a spreadsheet and back

Coming up

September 2026: symbol detection and reconciliation. Tags reconciled against symbols, and estimators able to instruct the model to look for specific symbols the engineer never tagged
October 2026: supplier pricing extracted straight from vendor quotes, with every document for a bid kept together in one place

Pricing

Pricing scales with project volume, not headcount. Every plan includes unlimited users.

Starter: $399 per month, up to 10 projects, then $35 each. Single location, email support, data isolation
Branch: $799 per month, up to 25 projects, then $25 each. Adds quoting workflows and priority support
Enterprise: custom. Custom project volume, multiple locations, direct ERP syncing, commercial intelligence

Annual billing saves 15 percent: Starter $339 per month, Branch $679 per month. A free trial is available, and plans can move up or down without penalty.

Security and data handling

Customer content is never used to train, fine-tune or otherwise improve any model. If that ever changed, Monaro would ask for explicit opt-in consent first, withdrawable at any time
Data is isolated to your organisation and never shared. Role based access control, least privilege, and multi-factor authentication on administrative access
Encrypted with TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES-256 at rest
Sign in through Microsoft or Google SSO, with MFA inherited from your identity provider, or an email magic link. Paid plans can enforce organisation level two factor authentication
Access is logged and monitored, with regular security reviews
SOC 2 Type II is in progress. Current security documentation is available to customers on request from security@monaro.ai
After termination, customer content is deleted or de-identified within ninety days unless the law requires otherwise
Data residency: drawings and takeoffs in AWS United States, account and billing in the US and Canada, development at Torinit in Canada

Company

Website: https://www.monaro.ai
Monaro.ai is a Torinit company
Austin: 7600 Chevy Chase Dr. #300, Chase Park, Austin, TX 78752, United States
Toronto: 155 Queens Quay E, Suite 200, Toronto, ON M5A 0B5, Canada
General enquiries: hello@monaro.ai
Phone: +1 416 206 9448
Security enquiries: security@monaro.ai

Industry context

Relevant associations: HARDI, CIPH, HRAI
Relevant events: HARDI Annual Conference, HARDI Regionals, AHR Expo, ASHRAE Annual