STILL AN INDUSTRY STANDARD, BLUEBEAM SOFTWARE is determined to rebound to the great heights and excitement of its early years in the US construction market. For sure, back then, Bluebeam led the “digitization movement” in construction companies essentially alone. During its ascendency, the Pasadena, California-based AEC industry darling was acquired by the German AEC giant, the Nemetschek Group. It was a smart move by the Group.
The Competition
Then the competition came. Up the California coast in a quiet town named Carpinteria, just south of the famed city of Santa Barbara, Procore emerged with a force, and the digitization of the construction market became supercharged. Others took notice.
In the years before COVID-19, the battle shifted in AEC construction from PDF markup dominance to comprehensive construction management software. The CDE (common data environment) became the holy grail to pursue, and several US and foreign companies had a great head start. Meanwhile, PDF-based markup has remained vital, even crucial, and continues to be so today.
Bluebeam CEO Usman Shuja on stage at Unbound 2025 in Washington DC earlier this month, as he introduces the upcoming Bluebeam MAX, an AI-infused set of Bluebeam offerings. (Image: Bluebeam, Inc.)
For a while, it seemed that Bluebeam’s next move was to compete head-on with the CDE systems. Its parent company articulated a grand CDE strategy that failed to materialize. (see: Architosh, “Architosh Exclusive—Nemetschek Group Unveils Its CDE Strategy with Bluebeam Technology at its Core,” 13 Dec 2017). Bluebeam entered its “wilderness years” and needed to regroup. They made a fateful move to abandon Revu on Mac after years of pent-up demand for it. Then Apple Silicon came, and Mac laptops surged with world-leading performance and battery life. Talk about bad timing.
This faux pas coincided with the company’s come-to-Jesus moment, but it certainly was not the cause of it.
Something needed to change.
Enter current CEO Usman Shuja, who, along with longtime Bluebeam co-founder Don Jacob, is bringing strategic clarity to the famed construction software darling whose users are now sitting at just under 4 million worldwide, according to the keynote on day one of Unbound.
2D Drawings, Markup, AI
After the BIM-ification of AEC, the emergence of the CDE, and the failed promises of industrial construction (think Katerra’s epic failure), it turns out that 2D drawings (blueprints as they used to be called) still matter. They matter a lot. They are the lingua franca of how designs and work get documented. They operate globally in construction, using a single file format: PDF. When it comes to PDF markup in AEC, Bluebeam essentially stands alone. And now in the era of AI agents, the 2D documents that make up the majority of data in the building industry can be surfaced by AI agents; they can be understood, translated, summarized, monitored, edited, shared, counted, measured, and a lot more.
Yet the real power is how AI agents can surface the data, not just in Revu markups but in the actual PDF itself. The PDFs then become your little data lake from which inference functions can take place.
2D documents remain the primary means by which the communication of design gets translated into building construction. This may never actually change or at least not for a decade or more. Where Bluebeam excels is in collaboration around a set of design and construction documents by the architecture and engineering professionals who create them.
To bolster its leadership in markup, Bluebeam is marshaling AI technologies both via tuck-in acquisitions and also home-grown innovations. Its implementation of Anthropics’s Claude AI agent and MCP server technology offers almost limitless possibilities.
Anthropic’s MCP technology enables users to tell an AI agent to do things in the software that are possible for the human user to do, but incredibly time-consuming. Instead of the user manually taking a series of actions in Revu, the MCP server orchestrates the entire process and basically runs the software functions to accomplish the task. An example might be finding and converting all Bluebeam Revu markup text that is not in all-caps and converting it to all-caps. This was the example we saw behind the the power of Bluebeam Max.
Luke Prescott, Sr. Director of Product Management (Head of Product) on stage at Unbound. He walked the audience through a series of new capabilities including home-grown AI features and those those involving MCP servers and Anthropic’s Claude. (Image: Bluebeam, Inc.)
Yet the real power is how AI agents can surface the data, not just in Revu markups but in the actual PDF itself. The PDFs then become your little data lake from which inference functions can take place. In the case of Firmus-AI’s technology, the software can surface the PDF construction drawings and find omissions, scope gaps, and a range of other issues.
MORE: Bluebeam unveils AI-powered Bluebeam Max at Unbound 2025
Humans today are responsible for reviewing construction drawings for completeness and accuracy. It is an arduous task that takes experience and a consistent, rigorous methodology in order to do it reliably. In the architecture or engineering office, failure can result in change orders or, if missed in the field, costly construction mistakes. At the general contractor’s office, missing issues early means finding them too late during construction and paying the price in costly schedule delays.
Firmus-AI was a superb tuck-in acquisition for Bluebeam. Seemingly unknown, the rumor is that a major VC firm active in the AEC industry began talking to them, and when Nemetschek learned of this, they moved in and offered to acquire them.
Tackling Pain in AEC
Firmus-AI is the type of ideal tuck-in acquisition for Bluebeam. Their specific innovations contained both “pain-killers” and “vitamins” types of technologies. Let me unpack that a bit. There are plenty of AI startups creating interesting new solutions, but many of them aren’t truly addressing today’s existing pain points in the industry; they are more like vitamins, making the AEC user’s workflow more robust and stronger, but they are not taking away real pain in existing workflows.
Firmus-AI’s matching technology is a bit like that; it overlaps with existing document compare technology Revu already has, but does it better and more completely, and makes those workflows more robust, introducing workflows users may not have realized they needed to have. In contrast, Firmus-AI review technologies tackle head-on the mundane and time-consuming tasks of comprehensive document review. This is not a vitamin but a bonafide pain-killer and offers one of the most exciting developments for Bluebeam’s future. (see: Architosh, “Bluebeam unveils AI-powered Bluebeam Max at Unbound 2025,” 1 Oct 2025)
Details Told to Press Only
In our small presser, Bluebeam executives Don Jacob and Luke Prescott answered all of our questions. One question this author asked had to do with Firmus.AI technology integration in Revu or Bluebeam Cloud. In the short term, Firmus will be integrated into calls that pass files into the Firmus cloud system itself (which is where Firmus.AI lives today). Then, in the future, the firm code itself will be brought into the desktop Revu and into Bluebeam Cloud (BBC).
MORE: Bluebeam acquires Firmus AI—accelerating drawing reviews
We also asked about the Mac and if the ARM version of Revu meant it would be easier to port Revu back to the Mac again, since it was already on it not long ago. The answer is, yes, the ARM on Windows version of Revu—which was in high demand by Bluebeam Revu users in the field—does make the Mac Revu effort a bit easier, but they are still not committed to it. This is actually progress. In the past, there was an absolute no to Revu on Mac. This time, an absolute no to Mac does not exist. But there is no plan for it either. (see: Architosh, “AIA25: Bluebeam supercharges performance, new integrations,” 11 Jun 2025)
Yves Padrines, CEO of the Nemetschek Group was also on stage to tout the benefits of the whole Group’s technology portfolio and how that benefits Bluebeam users.
Instead, the Mac Revu story plan has an interesting twist. There has been much consternation about Revu on the iPad and its lack of love by the company. The much-beloved Revu on iPad will finally be retired in late December of 2025, and users are encouraged to embrace the latest versions of Bluebeam for iOS and Android instead. These are much improved versions and part of a refocus on the importance of mobile.
The Mac strategy (at this moment) is actually an Apple iOS strategy. Because ARM-based Macs can run iOS apps natively, the goal is to enable Mac users to run Bluebeam on iOS versions well on their Macs. This works beautifully with Apple Silicon Macs only, but those are the computers users want to use anyway. While no specific timelines were mentioned, this was the point outlined in the presser. In the meantime, the 30% faster performance of Revu running on Apple M-series Macs running Parallels is an excellent choice given the industry-leading single-core performance Apple currently enjoys.
Growth and Forward
Luke Prescott stated that Bluebeam is hyper-focused on the importance of mobile, supporting both iOS and Android. While iOS is the dominant mobile platform in North America, Android is also critical for the company in foreign markets.
One thing that Prescott stated was that, compared to other mobile markup solutions in the industry, including its own past versions, markup was actually on an “image of a PDF, not the PDF itself.” Bluebeam has now mastered this, and its markups also meet the latest ISO standards for PDF markup.
With its new Stitching feature, Revu can now assemble multiple drawing segments into a single, continuous sheet—a breakthrough for transportation projects where plans often span several pages. Civil engineers are likely to embrace this powerful upgrade as Bluebeam continues to expand its footprint in the infrastructure side of the AEC industry.
Co-founder and former CTO Don Jacob talks about the new Stitching feature in Bluebeam Revu which will be a huge win for civil engineering workflows with long bridges and roads that never fit on a single page. (Image: Bluebeam, Inc.)
And speaking of growth, at just under 4 million users, Bluebeam noted that one-third of new users come from North America, the largest AEC market in the world. Other bright spots for growth include France and Germany and market verticals. In addition to verticals like infrastructure, Bluebeam sees expanding market presence in related verticals like energy and manufacturing, all of which are set to grow in reconstruction builds in war zones like Ukraine and Gaza.
Finally, in thinking about mobile again, Bluebeam’s acquisition of GoCanvas means that the company will benefit from and leverage its “field-first” technologies, first through integrated workflows and later through code-level integrations. This field-first technology stack bolsters Bluebeam’s ability to serve AEC users more deeply via personal-based thinking. The workflow needs of a construction professional who is always in the trailer are different than the needs of a professional who is always in the field. And both are different than the exacting needs of architects, engineers and other stakeholders.
In closing, Bluebeam Max, the company’s new AI-centric offering coming in 2026, will significantly improve the workflows of Bluebeam users today, through the smart leveragings of AI agents like the Claude technology integration from Anthropic. At the same time, the company seems much more certain about its strategic directions and what its users are looking for next.