For Xu Rui, construction was personal long before it became professional. Growing up in Singapore, she watched her father run a small subcontracting business in steel framing and foundations for civil engineering projects like schools, roads, and office buildings. His days were long, spent outdoors in the searing heat, managing crews of hundreds across multiple job sites. In the evenings, he’d return home sunburned, with paperwork, employee time cards, and other administrative tasks that her mother helped complete late into the night.

“It was tough for him physically and mentally,” Xu Rui says. “The work never seemed to end.”

Her father had one clear piece of advice for her future: Don’t go into construction — instead, pursue a career in tech.

Xu Rui listened. But in her own way, she found a path back.

Merging tech and construction

Today, Xu Rui is the co-founder and CEO of Klutch AI, a company bringing AI-powered agents to construction management. The mission is simple but ambitious: reduce the grueling overhead of project management in construction by automating time-consuming tasks like data capture, report generation, bid analysis, permit reviews, and vendor coordination. With specialized AI agents from pre-construction to post-build, Klutch aims to give construction teams the equivalent of extra project engineers, estimators, and field coordinators — right on their phone, embedded into tools like SMS texting and WhatsApp that they already use.

While plenty of software exists for back-office staff, workflows on actual job sites remain stubbornly analog. Teams that try to automate are instead bogged down by tools that require hours of manual entry, create data silos, and leave them juggling fragmented systems under mounting tech fatigue.

Klutch closes that gap by making information capture and retrieval on the field effortless, driving proactive project tracking that accelerates schedules and reduces risk.

“We see an opportunity to help improve day-to-day lives in an industry that’s always been tough,” says Xu Rui.

A dual education

As Klutch’s CEO, Xu Rui brings a rare combination of experiences. After studying computer science and economics at Duke University, she began her career at Microsoft, managing Azure Event Hubs, a distributed big data platform that ingests millions of events per second from apps, IoT devices, sensors, and websites. Later, she helped build and scale financial machine learning-driven analytics and accounting tools at Stripe, growing a new product line to double-digit millions in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in two years. It was, as she calls it, a mini-startup, and it taught her how to listen closely to customers and build a compelling product.

But while advancing her tech career, she was also laying the foundation for a thriving real estate business. Starting with a $72,000 foreclosure, Xu Rui renovated, flipped, and rented properties across Seattle. She eventually grew her company, Urban Nooks, which now manages a $65 million portfolio of personal and client assets.

She began by doing much of the labor herself — painting, laying tile, cleaning, assembling furniture. But as projects grew larger and more complex, she hired contractors and subcontractors, and quickly saw how inefficient and error-prone construction workflows could be.

“The first gut renovation I did was the most stressful project of my life,” she says. “It ran off schedule and went way over budget. We made no money on it.”

The inspiration for Klutch AI came as her business grew much faster than she intended. She struggled to connect the back-office team hired to oversee property operations with the on-site workers — contractors, maintenance staff, and cleaners. Photos and updates were passed around on multiple WhatsApp and text threads, then manually copied into Asana, QuickBooks, and other systems. The entire process was clunky, expensive, and rife with data silos.

“There just wasn’t a good way to connect what was happening in the field with the back office,” Xu Rui says. “We were losing time and money because of it.”

Meeting users where they are

The Klutch team has not only built a bridge between the office and job sites; they’ve equipped construction managers with tools to save time and reduce headaches. Instead of spending hours logging notes, photos, and updates from the field, construction project managers can simply talk to Bob AI, Klutch’s jobsite assistant. Bob automatically records, organizes, and uploads the information into the correct system, then generates reports and task lists needed for daily and weekly meetings.

Since launching Bob, the Klutch platform has quickly expanded its agent offerings into other phases of construction. Archie handles permit review tracking and feasibility reviews. Elliott automates takeoffs and estimating. Petra handles bid management and vendor scoring. Post-build, Hailey provides 24/7 client support while automating warranty and maintenance request management. Together, they function like a digital operations team. The information the agents gather also feeds into an ongoing company-wide knowledge vault and integrates with software like Procore and Salesforce.

The result is not just hours of manual work saved each day, but greater amounts of high-quality data. Klutch customers are collecting at least 10 times more data than before, unlocking insights into vendor performance, schedule gaps, planning and design optimizations, and hidden process bottlenecks — problems that directly impact profitability.

“In construction, a thousand things are happening all at once,” Xu Rui says. “Even small missteps can be the difference between profit and loss.”

One of Xu Rui’s key insights: New AI-powered technology succeeds only if it fits seamlessly into people’s existing habits. Klutch agents can be accessed through an app, and they also integrate into familiar channels like SMS and WhatsApp, tools widely used across construction sites. “Our goal isn’t to twist people’s arms to adopt a new thing. It’s to blend into workflows and communication channels that already exist,” she says.

Building for what’s next

When Klutch launched its assistants, Xu Rui and her team deliberately avoided imposing rigid boundaries on what customers could or couldn’t do with them. Instead, they trusted users to naturally discover which questions Klutch AI assistants handled best and which tasks they performed most reliably.

“As the models improve, what’s possible changes month by month,” Xu Rui says. “Already, we’re seeing answers get better and better, and results get more reliable.”

For Xu Rui, that’s what makes this moment so compelling. Klutch is bringing the power of AI into one of the least digitized industries in the world, giving people a practical tool that makes daily work less exhausting and more rewarding.

It’s a vision that has won over Xu Rui’s dad. Once determined to steer her away from the industry, he is now her biggest supporter. Currently in his fourth decade of running his business, he sees Klutch as a tool he wishes he’d had all along. “He told me, ‘If something like this existed when I started, my life would have been very different,’” Xu Rui says. “Now he just wants to try it for himself.”