AI structural steel takeoff: inside Ferra 1.5
Jul 29, 2026 · https://bidferra.com/videos/inside-ferra-1-5
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTlgmzYF4Lc

[0:02] Hey guys. So, my name is Joshua Ford. I got Michael Gu here as well. We are two of the three co-founders of Ferra. Ferra is a structural steel AI estimating tool. We've been sharing this with all steel estimators, mostly fabricators and erectors, specifically in the structural steel market. Myself, Michael Gu, and our other co-founder, Michael Carey, are the three ones who are running the show. The goal is to build a product that not only does columns and beams, but also other features which we'll talk about today. Michael.

[0:35] Hey, what's up guys? As Josh said, my name is Michael Gu. I'm co-founder CTO of Ferra. Today we'll be mostly talking about all the new features we've been building the last few months. That includes joist takeoff, brace frame takeoff, connection design, as well as some new add-ons to our revision feature that we're really excited to share and release.

[0:50] So, the revisions feature was an important one, right? We knew that early on a lot of customers were having issues with change orders. Maybe they win the job and now all of a sudden the GC, the architect, engineer moves columns, you know, moves beams, doesn't tell you what connections they're going to be. We listened to that and especially at the bigger level, the enterprise customers, they can spend a lot of time, okay, on figuring out where things have moved. It takes days, weeks on some big projects, right? Because you literally have to look at version one on a floor, version two, three, right?

[1:30] A lot of customers really wanted the ability to go, okay, I need to quickly be able to see how many columns and beams have been added, removed, deleted, etc. And then obviously I want to export that because I want to see the tonnage change. I want to see how that affects my schedule. So, we built it. It was actually one of the earliest features we did build. And the whole idea here was to help people not spend days or weeks trying to figure out in Bluebeam. Okay, columns move, beams move. This is deleted. I think this was... Oh, I'm not sure. I'm going to email the GC, email the engineer, go back and forth. Now, it just shows you in parallel, right, right away, which is obviously quite useful.

[2:05] So, yeah. What you see here is our revision feature. This is actually the side by side view. This is probably the most preferred view when it comes to looking at revisions. Most of our customers love this feature. So, it's actually pretty cool. You have the old version on the left here and we have the new version on the right. You can tell because of all the different colors on the right because columns have been moved, deleted, added, etc. And as Gu moves the mouse around, right, it actually will mirror and mimic what you're looking at, right? Which is super useful. Now, you don't have to look at different pages and look at different screens. You can actually just go one to one.

[2:34] And then he's actually selected a beam here. And you can see that it was a W21x55 and it's actually moved or adjusted to a W8x40. Now the studs have changed. Connection forces would be adjusted as well. All of this is summarized in the bottom right there. You can see tonnage, total studs, or bottom left, sorry. Beams of camber, beams and columns. And then the entire, you know, project is also summarized on the right there.

[3:00] As our beam column detection layer is getting smarter, our models are trained on more data, what we'll see is it can pick up the changes very accurately, especially given not just the steel type or the profile of the beam, but also the end reactions like Josh mentioned, the connection forces, now we're able to get those. So shear, moment, axial, we can get that.

[3:26] So something that you know obviously we've always been good at is detecting the beams, columns, also the grid lines and their intersections and then being able to build kind of the stick model from there. The other thing that we wanted to do obviously is pull in detail sections and also connection details. That was something that a lot of our customers wanted pretty much from the first day that we released our 3D model, they went straight to asking about connections and you know connection design.

[3:52] And obviously something that we want to do first before we get into that is make sure we get the counts correctly. What that means is we want to make sure our beam and column detection is accurate enough so that we can give you, hey, how many you know beam to column flange scenarios are there? How many beam to column web scenarios are there? How many beam to wall scenarios are there? Right? So those are kind of the counts, right, and then from the counts we can then provide a layer where you can then go and bulk edit those scenarios.

[4:20] So from here as you can see I have this button called bulk edit connections. From here I can actually select all the different beam types that we have detected and then I can essentially determine, hey, what are the specific connection types for all the scenarios. Right? So I can actually start to design that here. I have also options below for whether it's bolted, welded, or both. Angle size, bolt count, bolt diameter, bolt grade, any additional notes as well, that can be exported into the metadata when we export this to an IFC file or for Revit.

[4:51] So when I apply all these, let's just say, you know, connection scenarios here within our 3D model, we can then go in there and then we have now a connection layer. So, if I click into the connection layer, right, I can now see specifically all the connections I edited in different colors. So, I can zoom in. You can see all the connections I added there. And then from there as well, I can actually go zoom out and then there's one other cool feature we have which is called the tilt.

[5:23] And so, if I'm on a specific 2D page, I can actually press shift and command and actually tilt that page up. And then from here, I'll also be able to see the connection layers. So this is something that's really cool that we added where if you just want to see how a single floor is being designed in terms of connection material and the bolts, you can actually visualize that directly here. But also we have the full 3D model if you want it combined layer.

[5:53] Yeah, I think this is, I mean this speaks volumes. I mean this has been five, six months of work. A lot of customers like being able to go, "Oh, I'm working on my 2D drawings. I'm on floor three. I want to confirm that this makes sense to me. I want to zoom out and actually see." And you know, how awesome would it be if you could actually see the 3D on the drawing, right? And go, "Oh, this makes sense." Or, "Wait, hold on. The slope is a bit wrong. Just visually doesn't look correct. Oh, it is actually wrong. I need to go in and edit it." So, yeah, why don't we go ahead and talk about the new features, including joists.

[6:17] So, for joists, this is something that, yeah, we've really been working on. We're excited about. We had a lot of feedback where you know obviously beams is just part of the story when it comes to the structural steel on any given drawing. And so joists were a big part of that conversation and so we're excited to announce that today where we can now take off joists, specifically the joist libraries. So we're able to load in all the typical joist libraries including Vulcraft and New Millennium and we're also working with Canadian companies as well to figure out how we can load in their joists in our system.

[6:58] So the joist takeoff is very similar to the beam column takeoff that you're already familiar with. What's really cool here is if you have any specific or customizable joist, you can actually override the pounds per lineal feet. That's something that will then save to our system if you want to use that again.

[7:21] And then if we go to the takeoff table, you can see all the different joists here and then you can see which ones were actually picked up from a specific catalog. You can edit any of the joist designations or the types here. And then we also have a really cool hyperlinking feature which will then pull up all of the joists from the table in a split view. So side by side you can see the drawing and the table. And if I actually click on any of these, it's actually going to show me exactly where the joist is and pre-select it. So if I want to go and edit it, I can go and do that and see what I'm editing.

[7:57] This tool was always designed to be something to help structural steel estimators in their entire workflow and process. It is never designed to, you know, replace people. I know with AI people get kind of scared of that. The idea here is instead of you doing things manually, you know, you can obviously get a lot of that done by our, you know, AI algorithms based on how we've trained it, the customers we've worked with, etc. There's still a lot of work that you have to do, you know, on the job. You measure things, add things, fix things, adjust things, etc., right? Like having 20 years of experience will still pay dividends.

[8:31] It's just now it's going to pay even more dividends when you use a system like this, right? And that was part of the reason why when we first saw this market, we realized, okay, people are really kind of in a stone age a bit. We kept hearing that every estimator was like, "Oh, this industry is just, you know, so far back and some people are still printing and highlighting versus actually just doing things digitally." So, we knew right away there was definitely something there, and we just had to take the time and build it with the right people.

[8:58] Let's go. Josh, let's talk about the braces now.

[9:03] Yes, bracing and joists was something that no one was really doing well from what we'd heard from customers. So, it was something we wanted to tackle and we'll talk about it now.

[9:15] So, the brace detection is pretty simple, right? So, we have a new category at the top for braces. And when you click that, what it's going to do is obviously it's going to pull up all of the different sheets that we detect braces or trusses, right? So, we kind of categorize those together because they're often found in similar places and they're often in these section sheets or elevation sheets. And then from there, what we do, as you can see with these blue boxes, we actually detect the exact placement of each of the details. And then from there, we treat them each as their own detection surface. And then from there we'll detect with the green lines the specific braces.

[9:53] Right? So in this case we have some HSS there. Over here as well we have more HSS. You can see if I switch between them I'll have additional brace frames. So in this one we have just a lot of brace frames. But if you had trusses they would show up here as well. And then the more critical thing is how do I actually, you know, know where this goes in my drawing. So that's something that we worked really hard on, because you typically, right, you have your grid lines here and then you also have your elevations. So we should be able to essentially determine based on the positioning where that should go, but you also need to pull up the drawing to sometimes guide yourself, and that's what estimators will always do, is look at the drawing set side by side.

[10:39] So we actually built a specific tool for positioning brace frames. So if I click that position brace frames button, it actually pulls up exactly where in the drawing set this brace frame occurs. So you can see we automatically detected, hey, it's between B and C. We also know which grid lines it occurs in. And then from there, you can see this orange line is exactly where it occurs. And in this drawing, it's nice. It actually has the kind of X marks which then represent where the brace frame is. So that means our orange line is correct. And then from there you can actually confirm and then autoplace it if you want.

[11:09] What's nice for after that is if you go to our 3D model the brace frames will now appear. Right? So that's something that's really cool now, is our 3D model now is aware of those brace frames that I just showed you. And then I can zoom in and see exactly, from here we can determine if that's correct or not. And we can edit those. We can click on these elements and highlight them and adjust the positioning. Right? If it's, you know, a little bit off, we can do that. But as you can see, these are positioned exactly where they should be. And yeah, you can actually see very close into it.

[11:48] And then on top of that, we can layer in our connections. So from there, you can actually do connection design between your, you know, columns, beams, and your brace frames. And of course, you can export this via IFC, right? We've done it. We have several customers that do that and they use their own systems for that too.

[12:08] You can export it and like now that if you're in a specific level, right, you can actually go and see, let's say I was in this level just looking at the beams. I can actually project that and then be able to see, hey, here's some brace frames right below. So yeah, we're still kind of perfecting this, but this is, you know, overall working on any project that has brace frames, trusses, and if you need to position them multiple places, that's why we built that kind of specific editor for brace frame detection.

[12:41] Nowadays, we can see a project like this, you can actually get full beam, column, brace, joist takeoff within 5, 10 minutes, right? And obviously that, you know, you still have to review and make sure that it's all correct. So, one of our big pieces of this release is going to allow anybody a free trial, self-serve. So, you can actually go into bidferra.com. You can actually go and sign up directly, create an account. You'll answer a few questions and then from there, you'll be able to upload up to a certain amount of sheets. And then after that, you know, you can book a call and demo and talk to us to see like, you know, how we can fit into your workflow. What's the best pricing that makes sense for your team?

[13:24] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, everything will be on our website, bidferra.com. And also, you know, Gu and I post pretty regularly on LinkedIn, a blog post, a thought about something I see in the industry, obviously, features, customers. So, follow us there as well. Like I said, we post regularly. I think that's it, Gu. Well, I appreciate everyone's time and once again reach out to us if you need, bidferra.com, our LinkedIns, and we look forward to meeting you and hoping we can take those bids from weeks and days to, you know, minutes and hours. Thanks guys.

[13:56] Thanks guys. Yeah, take care.