The first startup launched by Radial Ventures has shifted its focus to large electrical contractors, quickly landing paid pilots and uncovering millions in costly bidding errors
Makeoff founder and CEO Will Zacher has spent hundreds of hours with electrical contractors.
He has a personal connection to the stress and risk of bidding on jobs, where small details can cost millions of dollars.
And he’s confident his company’s platform has a real role to play in changing the levers of this dynamic: making bids faster, more accurate and more confident.
Now he’s got another thing: a strong signal that he’s onto something.
Makeoff — the first company launched by the 43North Foundation's venture studio, Radial Ventures — has spent the past several months narrowing its focus toward one specific segment of the construction industry: large electrical contractors generating more than $100 million in annual revenue.
The response has been immediate.
Makeoff has launched three paid enterprise pilots with national contractors, has several more in the pipeline, and says its software has already identified tens of millions of dollars in estimating errors across projects reviewed on the platform.
"We made a very deliberate decision to focus on enterprise contractors," founder and CEO Will Zacher said. "The risk they're managing is enormous. Every estimate they're submitting represents millions of dollars in potential work, and a single missed detail can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Rather than replacing estimators, Makeoff serves as an AI-powered quality assurance layer, reviewing project plans across multiple disciplines to identify discrepancies that frequently get missed during the bidding process.
A chief estimator might manage a team of 10, 20 or even 40 estimators, each bidding on multi-million-dollar construction projects.
"They're essentially betting hundreds of thousands of dollars every day on people's ability to remember everything they read across hundreds of pages of drawings and specifications," Zacher said. "One customer told me our software helps him sleep at night."
On one project, the software identified inconsistencies involving lighting poles that could have resulted in a $30,000 to $40,000 loss. During another retroactive review, Makeoff analyzed a project where a contractor ultimately lost roughly $750,000. The platform identified approximately $250,000 in missed items, including electrical systems, lighting fixtures and a costly code compliance issue involving conduit installation.
"It helps you sleep at night. It's all the things you worry about in the background, that keep you up at night,” one chief estimator recently told the Makeoff team. "We found some pretty substantial dollar amounts of items that we did not have covered with our initial estimates."
Rather than pursuing smaller contractors, Makeoff now focuses almost exclusively on enterprise electrical contractors, a market Zacher estimates includes roughly 150 firms across North America.
Large contractors often operate on profit margins around 10%. Preventing even $1 million in estimating mistakes can dramatically improve the profitability of an entire year's work.
To date, Makeoff says projects reviewed through its platform have uncovered roughly $20 million in potential estimating issues.
Radial Ventures builds high-growth technology companies rooted in Buffalo. Led by one of Buffalo’s foremost tech entrepreneurs, ACV Auctions cofounder Dan Magnuszewski, Radial has a team of in-house entrepreneurs, engineers and designers who assess market opportunities, build new products and ultimately spinout companies.
Several additional ventures are now entering the market through Radial's development pipeline as the studio continues expanding its company creation strategy.
For Makeoff, the focus now shifts from proving the concept to scaling the business.
The company expects to continue expanding its enterprise customer base through the remainder of the year while preparing for a larger fundraising round as growth accelerates.
"We feel like we've found the right market," Zacher said. "Now it's about executing. The opportunity in front of us is significant, and we're just getting started."
