Philo Ventures is a founder-first co-building partner based in Utah. We run residency programs that pair us with founders to build companies together — from concept to seed-ready in under a year, versus the industry average of 3-plus years solo. Our full-stack co-building team covers engineering, design, product strategy, GTM, legal, and finance.
One of the highest-leverage things we do is help great founders find the right co-founders. That is exactly the moment Covellum is in.
Covellum is one of the companies we are actively co-building: an AI-powered pre-construction cost intelligence platform that gives architects, developers, lenders, and owner-developers instant, accurate, localized construction cost estimates early in the development process — before the expensive, time-consuming re-scoping cycles that happen when GC bids come back over budget. We are in active diligence with design partners including major architecture firms, institutional owner-developers, and construction lenders, and we are moving fast.
The founder behind Covellum is searching for the right technical co-founder to build with. Together, the founding team will work to enter Philo's Build residency — our 10-month, invite-only co-building relationship for founders who are committed to an idea and ready to build the company, with Philo as an operational partner and full access to Philo's funding and resources.
The construction industry is a $2 trillion market in the U.S. alone, and it still runs on gut instinct, relationship-based estimates, and spreadsheets. Covellum is built to change that.
You would be teaming up with Sam Bawden — a two-time founder bringing decades of business development experience and a deep network across Covellum's target customer base.
Sam is the founder and principal of EDIFICE Design + Architecture, where he designs buildings on multiple continents and works directly with some of the largest construction firms in the country. He has spent his career building real relationships with the architects, developers, lenders, and contractors who sit at the center of Covellum's market. He is also the founder of Cardiff Snowcraft, the Utah-born snowboard brand he started from zero in 2014 that now ships internationally.
Between EDIFICE and Cardiff, Sam brings the customer, the domain, an established network of warm relationships in Covellum's target market, and the instincts of a founder who has built a product brand from scratch. He is looking for the technical co-founder who can match that depth on the engineering and AI side.
As the Technical Co-Founder of Covellum, you will own the technology end-to-end and partner with Sam on shaping the product. This is a founder role, with all the ambiguity, ownership, and upside that implies. You will work directly with Sam, the Philo team, and our network of investors, industry experts, and design partners to take Covellum from early prototype to a system that real customers trust with real decisions.
This role is expected to evolve into a permanent technical leadership position, likely CTO, as Covellum scales. We are looking for someone who wants to own the technical foundation long-term and help shape the product vision alongside Sam.
Own the technical vision and architecture. Make the core calls on stack, data model, agent orchestration, retrieval strategy, and infrastructure. Decide what to build, what to buy, and what to defer. You are the architect of record.
Design the agentic core. Covellum is an agentic product. You will design how agents ingest plans, query cost data, reason about scope and assumptions, and produce defensible estimates — including the orchestration, tool use, memory, and evaluation layers underneath. The hard part isn't getting a demo to work; it's getting a developer or a lender to trust the output.
Build the data layer. Construction cost intelligence is a data problem before it's an AI problem. You will design the pipelines, schemas, and storage (relational, vector, geospatial) that let Covellum produce localized, accurate estimates and improve over time.
Ship the 0-to-1 product. Drive the build to first paying customers. Philo's engineering team builds alongside you — you are not the lone engineer trying to ship everything. As Covellum scales, transition from primary builder to engineering leader without losing technical depth.
Shape the product alongside Sam. Sam brings the customer and the domain. You bring the technical lens on what's possible, where AI is brittle, and how the system has to feel for an architect or a developer to trust it. Product strategy is something the two of you build together.
Build the engineering team. Recruit the founding engineers when the time is right. Set the bar for technical hiring, code quality, and how the team works.
Drive technical strategy. Stay ahead of the model, infrastructure, and tooling landscape. Make sure Covellum is building durable advantages, not just riding the current wave of AI capability.
Meaningful co-founder equity in Covellum. Real ownership in the company you help build.
Philo's firepower behind you. A Philo development squad that writes code alongside you — not just advises — plus design, product strategy, GTM, legal, finance, and pre-seed capital. You get the leverage of a backed founder without trying to build a company alone.
Opinionated coaching. Weekly accountability sessions, Founders Forum, and direct office hours with Philo leadership. Guidance from operators who have done this before; the call is still yours.
A bridge to your raise. Living-wage salary during the build phase, drawn from the capital the concept secures, with compensation refined as Covellum raises its first institutional round. Health, dental, and standard portfolio perks included.
Founder mentality. An obsessive sense of ownership, a bias for action, and the ability to make good decisions with incomplete information. You want to build a company, not just contribute to one.
A strong product mind. You think in products, not just systems. You have opinions about what separates an AI product that customers trust from a demo that impresses on a stage. You understand that agentic products live or die on UX, trust, latency, failure modes, and edge cases — not just model capability.
Deep fluency with agentic systems. You have built production systems with LLMs — orchestration, tool use, retrieval, evals, the whole stack. You have strong opinions about where current agent architectures fall apart and how to design around it. You can ship an agent that does real work for a paying customer, not just a wrapper around a prompt.
Strong database and data architecture chops. Schema design, data modeling, pipelines, vector stores, hybrid retrieval. You have built systems where the data is the moat, not just the wrapper.
Systems thinker. You think in architectures, not just features. You can sketch the system on a whiteboard, defend the trade-offs, and ship the thing.
Range from strategy to execution. You can set the technical direction and help write the code that proves it works.
Comfort with ambiguity. Covellum is early. The spec will change, the customer will surprise you, and the model landscape will shift under your feet. You are energized by that, not paralyzed by it.
Domain curiosity. You do not need to be a construction expert, but you need to be genuinely curious about the industry and willing to become fluent in how architects, developers, GCs, and lenders actually work. Bonus if you have built in AEC, proptech, or another regulated, documentation-heavy industry.
Real equity, real upside. Meaningful co-founder equity in a company being built with institutional capital and Philo's backing from day one.
The right co-founder is already at the table. Sam is a rare combination of domain expert, two-time founder, and product builder. You are not signing up to start with a partner who’s committed and already closing opportunities with customers.
A team co-building with you. Philo handles back-office (legal, finance, HR), builds alongside you on engineering and design, and connects you to a network of operators and investors — so you can focus on the product, the system, and the customer.
Active design partners and market pull. We have active conversations with institutional design partners, a working prototype, and a clear ICP thesis.
A technical problem worth solving. Pre-construction cost estimation is a real AI problem — messy plan documents, geographically heterogeneous cost data, scope ambiguity, and decisions made under uncertainty. The team that solves it well has the potential to become the cost intelligence layer for the entire built environment.
