About Buoyant

Proposals win work but burn senior hours. We're fixing that.

The AI agent platform for AEC. Starting with the pursuit.

Why we exist

Every firm runs on won work. Winning it shouldn't cost your best people.

The AEC industry wins its future through proposals. Yet at almost every firm, the people most qualified to win that work, the principals, senior engineers, and project managers, spend their nights assembling documents instead of doing the work they trained for.

We started Buoyant because that trade always felt wrong. The knowledge that wins pursuits already exists inside every firm: the past projects, the resumes, the photos, the lessons from the last debrief. It just lives in folders nobody can search and templates nobody trusts. AI finally makes that knowledge usable, if it's built into the tools where proposals actually get made.

Every landmark begins as a document.

So that's what we build: an AI agent platform that lives inside Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, owns the pursuit from RFP to submittal, and learns your firm's voice from the work you've already won. Today, the pursuit. Tomorrow, every workflow that isn't the engineering itself.

And we build for the whole industry: five-person environmental shops, hundred-person civil practices, national construction managers and general contractors. If your firm wins work through proposals, Buoyant is built for you.

2025Founded

San FranciscoHeadquarters

100+AEC proposal writers

Word + InDesignWhere we live

How we work

Six principles we actually use.

Empiricism over vibes

We build evals before we ship features and measure output quality, not token counts. Applied AI that works in the real world gets there by looking at the data.

Taste is the work

The product isn't code. It's proposals that win or lose eight-figure contracts. Making AI produce work a principal engineer would put their name on is the entire job.

Vertical depth is the moat

Our customers know more about remediation, inspection, and infrastructure than we ever will. Our job is to amplify their judgment, not replace it.

Ship close to reality

We sit on customer calls, read losing proposals, and own the loop from RFP to ship. No handoffs.

Rigor at the trust boundary

When the output goes to a regulator or a procurement officer, hallucinations cost real money and real reputation. Schemas, evals, provenance: the discipline is what makes the product possible.

Small team, high leverage

A handful of people own everything, shipping features they designed from code they're still answering for a year later.

The team

Built by people who've seen both sides.

Jackie Chen

Co-founder & CEO

LinkedIn ↗

Jackie Chen is an engineer by training and a company builder by background. He began his career in engineering and built two businesses in college before spending a decade investing in infrastructure, construction, and climate technology.

As a venture investor, he worked closely with founders building software for operationally complex and regulated industries, including Monograph (operating system for architects) and Worldly (ESG and sustainability data platform). Across more than 30 investments, he partnered directly with founders navigating growth, margin pressure, and the realities of scaling workflow-heavy businesses.

Over time, he became increasingly focused on the operating reality inside engineering and consulting firms: how proposals are assembled, how senior engineers are pulled into non-billable work, and how administrative load limits growth more than technical capacity.

That is what led him to start Buoyant.

Today, Jackie works directly with engineering and consulting firms to modernize proposal and documentation workflows. His focus is practical: protect senior billable time, improve consistency and defensibility, and help firms grow backlog without expanding overhead.

Eric Chiang

Co-founder & CTO

LinkedIn ↗

Eric brings nearly a decade of experience building AI systems and large-scale production services. His work spans retrieval and ranking, LLM orchestration, and the backend infrastructure that keeps outputs fast, reliable, and auditable in real-world enterprise workflows.

At Amazon Prime Video, he worked on large-scale services powering real-time playback and recommendation workflows. The systems he helped deliver supported 200M+ daily streams and 200k+ TPS, while contributing to 99.999% availability and roughly $5M in annual efficiency gains.

Operating in a dependency-heavy production environment reinforced a security-first engineering approach: strict data access boundaries, resilient failure handling, and clear auditability under pressure. He designs systems with the assumption that sensitive data and customer trust are both mission-critical.

At Buoyant, he applies that same approach to AI-powered proposals and workflows for engineering and consulting firms, improving quality and speed without trading off control. He is the engineer teams rely on when the work involves sensitive client information and firm reputation is on the line.

Where we're going

Proposals are just the starting point. Over time, Buoyant will grow into the operational workflows that surround winning and delivering engineering work, always embedded in the tools your team already uses.

Come build with us.

Join the team building the AI agent platform for AEC.

See open roles