Our story

Twelve years of the same problem. Then we built for it.

Core 137 was founded by Jose Baloa after twelve years working across the US construction industry — long enough to learn that the costly errors are rarely technical. They happen in the handoffs, between the tools.

How it started.

Not a market gap someone spotted from the outside. A set of failures the founder kept paying for.

Twelve years

In more than one seat

Jose Baloa spent twelve years in construction in the United States — estimating, procurement, field coordination, and the office side of jobs that were already behind. Different trades, different states, different sizes of company. The problems did not change with any of them.

The pattern

The same failure, new clothes

A takeoff measured in one tool, priced in a spreadsheet, retyped into a proposal. An addendum that lands after the bid goes out. A field change that reaches the office two weeks later, once the work is already covered. Procurement buying against an estimate nobody updated. Not carelessness — structure. The work was entered more than once, and every copy drifted.

The decision

Build for the gap

After years of writing those failures down, Jose Baloa stopped working around them. Core 137 is what came out of that: estimating, procurement, project management and live field-to-office communication in one system, at a price a working contractor can carry.

Nobody loses a job because they cannot measure a wall. They lose it because the number that was measured, the number that was priced, the number that was ordered and the number that was invoiced stopped being the same number — and nobody could see the moment they parted. That is not a tooling preference. It is where the margin goes.

What kept going wrong.

None of these are exotic. Every one of them is ordinary, repeatable, and expensive — which is exactly why they were worth building against.

  1. 01.Every handoff was a retypeMeasure in one place, price in another, propose in a third. Each transfer is a chance to drop a line, and the error surfaces at closeout, not at the bid.
  2. 02.The drawings moved after the bid went outA revision or an addendum invalidates scope that has already been priced and sent. Catching it depends on somebody noticing, not on the system.
  3. 03.The field and the office ran on different clocksWhat changed on site reached the office days later. By then the condition is buried, the crew has moved on, and the change order is an argument instead of a record.
  4. 04.Procurement drifted from the estimateYou bid an assembly and buy something else. The substitution is usually reasonable and almost never makes it back to the number the job was won on.
  5. 05.Margin was invisible until it was goneCost to complete lived in a spreadsheet that was accurate on the day it was written. Everything after that was memory.
  6. 06.The stack cost more than the work it savedFive subscriptions, five logins, five bills — and integration left as an exercise for the contractor. Small companies simply went without.
What we built

One place the job is entered. Every stage reads from it.

A category of separate products — takeoff, procurement, project management, field reporting — assembled into one system, so the estimate, the purchase order, the schedule and the invoice are the same job seen from different angles.

EstimatingMeasure once, and keep the basis attached.Take off from the drawings, price against assemblies, and hold on to why the number is what it is. The estimate is the source every later stage reads.
AI, includedIn the price, not beside it.Grounded in your own workspace and cost book. Every plan includes it; the plan sets how much you can use, never whether you get it.
ProcurementBuy against what was estimated.A substitution is recorded as a change to the number, not a decision that quietly disappears.
Project managementStatus read, not reconstructed.Schedule, RFIs, submittals, change orders and pay applications on the same records.
Site ↔ office, liveOne clock for the field and the office.What happens on site is logged where the office already looks — no end-of-week catch-up, and no condition only one person saw.
Drawings and documentsRevisions kept as revisions.What a bid was priced against is still there after the set has been superseded three times.
Non-negotiables

What we hold to. Commitments, not positioning. Each one costs us something, which is the only reason it is worth writing down.

AI is in the price, not beside it

Every plan includes it; higher plans raise the limits. Charging separately for the part that saves the most time is how software gets sold, not how it gets used.

Your numbers stay yours

Assistants read your workspace and your cost book to answer, and cite what they read. Your data is never used to train shared models.

Enter the work once

If the platform makes you type the same quantity twice, it has reproduced the problem it exists to remove.

Built for the field

If it does not work with muddy boots and one bar of signal, it is not finished.

Priced for the contractor

The companies that lose most to these failures are the ones least able to buy five products to fix them. Efficiency the small operator cannot afford is not efficiency.

I spent twelve years working around the gaps. I would rather spend the next twelve closing them.

Jose Baloa — Founder & CEO, Core 137

See whether it holds up against your next bid.

Estimating, procurement, project management and the field — on one platform, with AI included in every plan.