The Purplefish Pipeline || April: Tougher Packets, Faster Processing, Better Exports
Purplefish is an AI-powered takeoff platform for industrial pipe contractors and fabricators. This is our regular update on what we're building, what we're learning, and what's improving inside Purplefish.
One month in
It's been just over a month since launch, and the response has been beyond what we expected.
- We're live with over 10 clients.
- We've processed over 15,000 pages of piping isometric drawings.
- Our biggest single packet clocked in at 2,200 pages.
- Our QA team has audited over 2,000 of those pages, line by line, character by character, for accuracy.
- Most importantly, we've maintained over 99.3% accuracy on our BOM extraction.
On the product side, we spent most of April making Purplefish faster, more accurate, and easier to use.
The Purplefish Document Engine: built for messy real-world ISO packets
Most of our engineering resources this past month went into our foundation: the Document Engine. This is the system that reads your piping isometric drawings, extracts the bill of materials, and turns it into structured data an estimator can actually work with.
The goal is simple: make Purplefish the most accurate, consistent, fast, and scalable system for extracting material and labor from piping isometrics.
Clean PDFs are one thing. Real bid packages are another.
We're building for BOMs that are scanned, layered, handwritten, upside down, multilanguage, split across multiple messy tables, packed with overlapping text, or formatted differently from one engineering firm to the next. (Stone tablet support coming soon.)
That is where Purplefish has to win.
Purplefish is not an OCR wrapper or an off-the-shelf LLM. Our Document Engine runs multiple vision models, language models, and validation layers in parallel, then reconciles their outputs to produce consistently accurate BOM extraction across messy real-world ISO packets.
Better Excel BOM exports
The Excel export got a major overhaul so you can spend less time rearranging and more time estimating. We added a few procurement-ready views by component and material type.
Title block extraction
We started extracting title block data from piping isometric drawings.
You can now see title block fields such as drawing number, line number, revision, spec, NDE, Service, Paint, Insulation and more, right inside Purplefish in a dedicated tab next to the BOM. We're running a few more days of QA before adding title block data to the Excel export. Once we're confident in the accuracy, it will show up there too.
For estimators doing material takeoff from isometric drawings, this means less flipping back to the drawings to find critical installation details.
AI plus human oversight
While our Document Engine handles the extraction at over 99% accuracy, every packet also gets a parallel human QA pass. Our reviewers check for rare but important issues: missing BOMs, skipped lines, missing size and quantity values.
This two-pass approach (AI extraction followed by human review) is how we deliver the confidence level that pipe fabrication contractors need before they bid on a job.
What's next
We're starting work on Labor Takeoff. If you work in pipe fabrication and want to help shape what that looks like, we'd love to hear from you: hello@purplefish.com
Full bore ahead,
Adam & Martin
& the Purplefish Team
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