New York City’s built environment is one of its most vital assets. With over 8 million residents and more than 200,000 businesses, the city depends on safe, functional, and adaptable buildings to support daily life and economic activity. Maintaining and modernizing this vast infrastructure — nearly 1.1 million buildings citywide — is essential to keeping New York moving, growing, and thriving.

The NYC Department of Buildings (DOB) plays a central role in this effort, serving as the primary regulator of construction and real estate across the five boroughs. As cities across the country face rising construction costs and increasing pressure to deliver affordable housing, agencies like DOB need modern tools and approaches to meet demand without compromising safety.

Recognizing this need, DOB partnered with the Partnership Fund for New York City in 2024 to launch the Buildings Tech Lab (BTL) — a first-of-its-kind initiative to identify, test, and scale technologies that can improve agency operations, reduce construction costs, and accelerate safe development. In its inaugural year, the BTL focused on two pressing challenges: process management and data utilization.

The BTL received over 90 applications from startups and technology providers around the world. Following a competitive review process involving 28 DOB staff, eight companies were selected to conduct an eight-week proof-of-concept. Each company worked closely with DOB leaders to deploy their technology and show their value proposition.

This report outlines each solution, how it was used, and what it revealed — offering a glimpse into how innovation can help make it faster, safer, and more affordable to build in New York City.

The BTL is the Partnership Fund’s third public sector collaboration, and the newest demonstration of the Partnership Fund for New York City’s “Tech in the Public Interest” strategy, which aims to invest in companies and programs that advance the application of new technologies to address urban challenges, including helping government agencies deliver services more effectively.

92

APPLICATIONS

28

PUBLIC-SECTOR EVALUATORS

8

PROOFS OF CONCEPT

Key Takeaways

Archistar, Civcheck, and GreenLite Technologies demonstrated how their software can reduce manual review cycles and speed up permitting and code compliance processes — cutting review times, improving submission quality, and freeing up staff capacity.

Infilla helped DOB teams collaborate across departments, standardize responses, and preserve institutional knowledge — ultimately enabling faster, clearer guidance for both staff and applicants.

Routora customized its automated route planning software, optimizing inspection schedules and routes based on DOB specific priorities, work rules and traffic trends. Routora estimated their tool could save hours of administrative time, enable more inspections, and could help reduce inspection backlogs in the future.

Gryps, Tolemi, and TheStoop.AI ingested siloed data streams and provided new insights helping DOB identify high-risk properties and streamline enforcement actions, optimize inspector time and improve safety outcomes through smarter targeting.

Process Management Challenge

How can we better manage internal processes to expedite permitting processes, building inspections, code reviews, and enforcement initiatives?

Archistar

Sydney, Australia

DOB Department: Tech Affairs - Code & Zoning Interpretation Unit

Archistar provides a software tool to help government and developers streamline compliance checks by swiftly checking proposed building designs against up-to-date local zoning and construction codes, which saves time and minimizes construction delays and risk.

Archistar digitized NYC’s Zoning Resolution Article II, Chapter 3, enabling its software to check the compliance of three residential permit applications against 26 zoning regulations. After three feedback cycles, the tool achieved 100% compliance and accuracy for the three diverse sample projects. By running this check before DOB staff manually review the applications, Archistar estimates it can cut 2-4 review cycles per application, with estimated savings of $1.7M annually by accelerating the review process and scaling it across all DOB applications.

"The software is intuitive in its analysis and the ability to track discrepancies and highlight the drawings for each citation reduces confusion and allows for clearer understanding of the zoning check.”

- Cost Validation Unit

Civcheck

Boston, MA

DOB Department: Tech Affairs - Code & Zoning Interpretation Unit

Civcheck provides a Guided AI Plan Review (GPR) platform that speeds up permitting by helping applicants improve the quality of their submissions up-front and enabling cities to streamline plan reviews through guided automation.

CivCheck used its AI-driven software to pre-screen 14 residential alteration and enlargement plans against 50 regulation checks for missing information and code compliance. Six DOB plan reviewers reported a 25% time savings after using the tool. In the future, CivCheck’s pre-screening tool could save over 60 minutes per permit by identifying missing information upfront — reducing review cycles, speeding up approvals, and optimizing DOB reviewers’ time.

"Our collaboration with Civcheck has provided a valuable opportunity to evaluate how AI can enhance regulatory compliance by automating data extraction and pre-screening against zoning and code requirements. Working closely with our Project Advocates and Plan Examiners, we assessed the tool’s logic and its potential to streamline DOB review workflows.”

-Coding and Zoning Advisor

Infilla

San Francisco, CA

DOB Department: HR, Code and Zoning Interpretation Unit

Infilla builds configurable workflow software to help planning & building staff be more efficient, transparent, and consistent in their day-to-day work, which expedites the permitting and inspections process.

Over 100 DOB staff members used Infilla’s centralized, searchable platform for common internal questions, called the Forum. Across both the Human Resources and the Code and Zoning Interpretation teams, DOB subject matter experts answered incoming questions from DOB employees efficiently, cutting response times from 8.5 days to 10 hours — delivering answers 20x faster. The Forum enabled DOB experts to quickly respond to common questions, enabling teams to coalesce around a single source of truth, ensuring consistent information across units, preserving institutional knowledge, and improving training for the next generation of reviewers.

"As a technical subject matter expert and test user, I saw firsthand how Infilla enabled meaningful cross-department collaboration. Plan Examiners submitted zoning questions, while staff across the agency contributed HR related inquiries. The platform supported a structured review process where experts could provide input, collaborate toward consensus, and publish clear, accessible guidance. This promoted transparency and consistency across the organization.”

-Coding and Zoning Advisor

GreenLite

New York, NY

DOB Department: Sustainability

GreenLite Technologies offers LiteTable, a modern code compliance and plan review platform that streamlines the review process with organized comments, integrated code references, and one-click response letters, enabling faster and more efficient workflows.

Six DOB plan examiners used LiteTable’s modern code compliance platform to review 11 plans, generating over 180 comments. LiteTable’s platform streamlines the review process by automating comment transfer into existing systems and enabling rapid generation of response letters, helping teams save time and reduce manual effort. In the future, LiteTable has the potential to save reviewers time by automatically transferring comments into DOB’s record keeping system and generating one-click response letters.

"The agency is always looking at new ways to improve operations and services in the development of New York’s built environment. The technology showed promise in streamlining comment and objection tracking, especially with potential integrations into DOB systems. The team was responsive, collaborative, and open to feedback, incorporating suggestions quickly over two review cycles.”

-Energy Code Compliance

Routora

Dallas, TX

DOB Department: Information Technology

Routora provides a route planning tool that generates efficient, time-saving routes, reducing costs and minimizing environmental impact for individuals and teams.

Routora is customizing its automated route planning software for DOB, allowing daily inspection schedules to be uploaded and optimized based on DOB-specific priorities and work rules. Routora estimated they could save over 625 hours of administrative work per week and enable DOB to complete over 52,000 additional inspections annually. By optimizing inspector routes, Routora can help boost staff productivity, prioritize inspections by need, and reduce inspection backlogs.

“Collaborating with Routora offers valuable insight into how emerging technologies can reshape complex routing and scheduling. Their ability to quickly incorporate and adapt to intricate routing parameters is demonstrating how intelligent automation can significantly streamline field operations. This experience reinforced the Department’s long-term vision to adopt automated routing as a core capability to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and scalability in scheduling practices.”

– Executive Director, Business Support Services

Data Utilization Challenge

How can we better utilize existing data to automate operations and increase staff capacity?

Gryps

New York, NY

DOB Department: Bureau of Enforcement

Gryps is the creator of an AI-powered search & data platform to help construction project owners find information in seconds.

Gryps’ AI-powered search platform ingested data from over 25 public data systems and analyzed 43,000 violation records, automating operations and boosting staff capacity for the Class 1 Reinspection program. By streamlining data management and optimizing reinspection workflows, Gryps estimates they can double inspector productivity, save 2,500 hours annually across four supervisors, and enhance data accuracy. In addition, Gryps's automated reporting and compliance tracking capabilities surfaced patterns in violations and reinspection outcomes that were previously difficult to detect—unlocking new opportunities for revenue recovery and strategic enforcement through data-driven insights.

“Gryps is a highly motivated group of professionals who are both agile and responsive. Whenever issues arose during our process, they consistently found solutions that allowed us to continue operating without delay. The aggregation and connection of disparate data was helpful in operationalizing our off-platform work functions. In addition, the ability to catalog our internal data for historical reference was a game-changer for business continuity.”

-Senior Advisor, Bureau of Enforcement

TheStoop.AI

New York, NY

DOB Department: Bureau of Enforcement

TheStoop.AI is an informatics and machine learning platform that redefines how real estate is understood and acted upon. By delivering real-time visibility and analysis of activities, buildings, companies, and individuals, it uncovers opportunities and risks that guide smarter decisions. Rooted in Jane Jacobs’ vision of cities as living systems, TheStoop.AI is committed to advancing a new paradigm for a more efficient and effective built environment.

TheStoop.AI (formerly Propcheck) used public data to develop risk scores for 7,000 properties, prioritizing 300 construction sites likely performing unpermitted work — a safety risk and a high-fee violation. Over three weeks, DOB inspectors visited 178 of these sites, issuing over 30 violations and confirming unpermitted work at nine sites, increasing the violation identification rate to 15%. This sharper targeting enables DOB to deploy its enforcement resources more efficiently and uncover work that might otherwise go undetected by surfacing previously hidden patterns of noncompliance.

"Working with [TheStoop.AI] really opened our eyes to the possibility of what smart data analysis can do for optimizing inspections and really homing in on where we might find dangerous building conditions. We focused on trying to find locations where work was occurring without permits, but really there are multiple possibilities where we could effectively deploy this technology.”

- Assistant Commissioner, Engineering Services

Tolemi

Boston, MA

DOB Department: Strategic Enforcement

Tolemi builds data integration, insights, and workflow automation tools to improve public safety.

Tolemi integrated 32 datasets, linking 7 million records to the City’s 1.15 million tax parcels and identifying 1 million associations involving property owners, active DOB licensees, and more. Its association graphs untangled complex ownership structures, revealed risk patterns, and enabled DOB to uncover connections from a single property search in seconds — a task that previously took 84 hours. Tolemi’s tool can automatically alert staff when active permits involve entities with a history of violations and other safety concerns, enabling DOB to proactively enforce compliance at high-risk properties at scale.

“Finding the proverbial needle in a haystack is always a challenge when conducting investigations and Tolemi’s technology helps surface information and quickly make connections with data stored across disparate systems. Their tool is a potential game changer.”