From a Founder's Idea to an AI Structural Engineer: Building Opticors From the Ground Up

11+ months of active partnership, ongoing · Core team: 2 developers + delivery manager + designer + structural engineering consultant · Used by some of Europe's largest construction companies

The Client

Opticors is a Czech construction-tech startup with one specific, expensive problem in its sights: structural calculations for prefabricated concrete halls and industrial buildings normally take weeks, done by hand or with generic tools, before a contractor can even bid on a project.

Founder Boris Krchnak brings years of hands-on experience building prefabricated concrete structures himself, and is a recognized expert in the field — he wasn't guessing at what the industry actually needed. His vision was an AI system that could do the same calculations in minutes to hours instead of weeks — a deterministic engine, not a black box, that structural engineers could actually trust with real buildings.

Getting structural calculations wrong isn't like a bug in a typical business app — it means a building that doesn't hold up, or a construction firm that stops trusting the tool, and the company, entirely. That was the real stake from day one: build something structural engineers would actually rely on, not just something that looked convincing in a demo.

Our Solution

We didn't start from a spec — we started from a blank page with Boris. The first roughly four months were pure product discovery: workshop after workshop, testing hypotheses about how the tool should actually behave, digging into AI research for the calculation engine, and building the business case together — before a single screen was designed.

From there, the build followed its own sequence: UX/UI first, then development of the whole stack — system architecture, infrastructure, and the hardest part, the structural (static) calculations themselves and how they actually behave inside the product — followed by a pilot version with real users, and finally the live launch. This isn't standard business logic; it's engineering math that has to produce Eurocode-compliant, trustworthy results every time, for a deterministic AI engine that gets no room for a wrong answer.

On top of that, we added the finishing touch: 3D visualization of the finished structural elements and objects, so a contractor can actually see what the calculations describe, not just read a report.

The engine we built is deterministic by design — the same inputs always produce the same structural answer, which matters when an engineer has to be able to defend that answer to a client or a building authority. Opticors is even pursuing independent certification of the underlying formulas through Brno University of Technology, precisely because trust in construction can't be assumed — it has to be provable.

Boris's own background in prefab construction met dedicated structural engineering expertise on our side — specialists in prefabricated concrete structural design — and together they brought genuinely unique know-how to the project, not just developers guessing at civil engineering.

Turning that expertise into working software was led by Zdeněk Šiška and our team, who carefully used AI to help translate the underlying mathematical and structural formulas into the application itself — every step done under the strict review of expert structural engineers, so speed never came at the cost of getting the engineering right.

How We Work Together

We've worked with Opticors continuously for 11+ months now, in close, direct contact with Boris on both product direction and delivery.

The team combines two developers, a delivery manager, and a designer with a structural engineering consultant who works alongside the product discussions — so decisions about how the calculations should behave get made with real domain expertise in the room, not guessed at afterward.

The Result

Opticors is now used by some of the largest construction companies in Europe — the kind of clients who won't bet a bid on a tool unless the numbers behind it are right.

For these companies, the tool doesn't just save time: on a single construction project, it can save tens of millions in material costs, by finding a structural design that uses exactly what's needed and no more.

Eleven-plus months in, the partnership is still active and still building — from a blank page with a founder to a tool trusted by some of the biggest names in European construction.