Newforma, a Boston company that makes project and information management software for architecture, engineering, construction and owner firms, has acquired Lumi AI, a Toronto startup whose analytics engine turns plain-language questions into answers with the reasoning shown. The deal was announced on October 21, 2026.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Newforma chief executive Peter Cannone told Construction Dive there would be no layoffs at Lumi.
Lumi co-founder and chief technology officer Tudor Boiangiu joins Newforma as vice president of AI engineering, and the Lumi engineering team will keep working from Toronto. Co-founder and chief executive Ibrahim Ashqar is stepping back after the acquisition, AgFunderNews reported. Cannone said Lumi will not be offered to companies that are not Newforma customers.
What Lumi built
Lumi was founded in Toronto in 2023 by Ashqar and Boiangiu. It started as an assistant that retrieved and interpreted data, drew charts and pulled out insights, and later became what it calls an agentic analytics platform that connects to a company's data sources, builds a layer describing what the data means, and surfaces opportunities on its own.
The engine asks clarifying questions when a prompt is vague, shows the logic behind each answer and flags data quality problems it finds, according to Newforma. Its customers included supermarket chains, consumer goods companies and consultancies, and it said clients had used it to find opportunities in inventory, sales and procurement data.
"We started Lumi to redefine how people interact with their own data: to make it as simple as asking a question," Ashqar said in the announcement.
“Our customers don't need another AI that sounds confident, they need answers they can verify.”
Why Newforma is buying
Newforma, owned by Ethos Capital, has spent more than 20 years storing project records such as requests for information, submittals, issues and email. Its pitch is that it gives firms a single view across the many systems a project already uses, rather than asking them to move everything into one tool.
Lumi's engine will first be built into Newforma's own products. It will extend Vojo, the AI assistant Newforma introduced in May, and add analytics to the dashboards in Newforma Konekt, with rollout details still to come. Newforma said the first uses will be workflows where an answer can be checked against the project record.
"Our customers don't need another AI that sounds confident, they need answers they can verify," Cannone said. Boiangiu said Lumi had spent three years building an engine that asks instead of guessing, and that the work needed data that already meant something, which Newforma had.
The founders and the funding
Lumi raised a $3.7 million seed round in March 2025 led by AgFunder, with Forum Ventures, Abu Dhabi's ADQ, the UAE syndicate Qora71 and angel investors taking part, according to Enterprise Middle East. Forum Ventures and Annex Investments had led an earlier round of undisclosed size in August 2023. The company also had a significant presence in the UAE.
Ashqar told AgFunderNews, which is owned by Lumi investor AgFunder, that the company decided to pursue an exit at the end of May 2026 after trying to raise a Series A of $10 million to $20 million. He said Lumi had triple-digit annual recurring revenue growth, a 90% pilot graduation rate and 109% net revenue retention.
"We were doing well. But they aren't the crazy growth metrics that are expected from AI companies," Ashqar said. He said the deal protects employees' jobs and keeps service running for customers. Lumi's headcount was not disclosed.
A busy year for construction tech deals
Construction software companies have been buying AI teams through 2026. Construction Dive listed Procore's purchases of Datagrid in January and DroneDeploy, agreed in July, Autodesk's acquisition of Rhumbix in March and Trimble's agreement in April to buy Document Crunch.
Lumi's sale also shows a common path for small AI startups in 2026: a seed-funded company with paying customers but without the growth needed for a large Series A finds a buyer that has the data and distribution it lacked. Ashqar said Lumi mainly competed with large general-purpose platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake.
