Our story
Built from the inside out.
Wukanda was not designed in an innovation lab. It was built inside a working AEC firm, by an operator who watched senior engineers lose hours every week to work that had already been done before.
Our origin
Built from the inside.
Alice Wong grew up watching AGS, Inc., a Bay Area geotechnical and environmental engineering firm with a 40-year project history, navigate every technology shift: CAD, GIS, digital deliverables, cloud storage. AI was next, and no product existed for firms at this scale.
She spent time working inside AGS as an operator, not a consultant. She saw where senior time was being lost: proposals, archive searches, report revisions. She built Wukanda to fix it from the inside out.
The market gap
Not built for them.
Enterprise AI consultants have minimum engagements larger than most AEC firms' annual revenue. Vertical SaaS tools solve one workflow but still need an operator to adopt them. ChatGPT cannot connect to project servers or comply with client data policies.
Wukanda fills the missing middle: vertical-aware, operator-led, and built for a 30-person engineering firm. Not a Fortune 500.
Why generic AI fails AEC
We saw exactly where AI breaks when it meets real project archives.
Generic AI tools are built for blank-slate prompts. AEC firms do not have blank slates. They have 20 years of proposals on a shared drive, client-confidential field reports, permission boundaries that differ by project, and senior staff who will not trust an output they cannot trace back to a source document.
ChatGPT does not know which report was approved for that watershed project in 2019. Copilot does not respect the access rules your PM set up in SharePoint. Enterprise AI consultants charge more per month than a junior hire. The firms that actually need leverage are left choosing between tools that do not fit and consultants they cannot afford.
Operating philosophy
AI augments principals.
It does not replace them.
Wukanda does not generate outputs that leave the firm without a principal's review. Drafts are reviewable. Recommendations are source-cited. Approvals are human. The system is designed for the 15-person geotech firm where the principal is the quality filter, not a Fortune 500 with a dedicated AI governance team.
Company promise
Secure. Workflow-specific. Human-approved.
Your data stays in your workspace
We connect to your selected folders and systems. No pasting client files into public chat tools.
Permission-aware by default
Retrieval mirrors the access rules already defined in your firm's workspace.
Every output is reviewable
AI drafts, extracts, and recommends. Your team approves before anything leaves the firm.
Deployed in 90 days
First working workflow live within three months, not six months of discovery sprints.
What we stand for
AEC expertise
Built on 40 years of real project workflows: proposals, reports, archive searches, estimating. Not generic AI retooled for AEC.
Operator-led
Every workflow is designed with the people who run operations Monday morning, not strategy consultants who leave after the kickoff deck.
Outcome-focused
We measure hours recovered, proposal cycle time, and retrieval speed. Not AI maturity scores or adoption rates.
From family firm to market gap
How we got here.
- 1985
AGS, Inc. founded, Bay Area
Alice's family founds a geotechnical and environmental engineering firm. 40 years of projects, relationships, and institutional knowledge accumulate across drives, binders, and inboxes.
- 2023
The problem becomes undeniable
Senior staff are spending 30–40% of their week on proposals, archive searches, and report revisions. AI tools exist, but none are built for a 30-person AEC firm with 40 years of legacy data and strict client confidentiality requirements.
- 2025
Wukanda launches with AGS as design partner
Bay Area beachhead. First working AI workflows deployed inside AGS within 90 days: proposal retrieval, archive search, report QA. Case study in progress.
- 2026
Expanding to 10 design partner firms
Geotech, civil, structural, environmental, and architecture disciplines. Building the workflow library that makes every new firm deployment faster and more precise.
Team
Operators and engineers, building together.
Wukanda pairs someone who ran inside a real AEC firm with an engineering founder who has shipped AI inside enterprises. Domain judgment and technical depth, on the same team.
Alice Wong
Founder & CEO
Operator inside AGS, Inc., a 40-year Bay Area geotechnical and environmental engineering firm. She brings the AEC domain knowledge: the proposal crunches, archive hunts, and report revisions Wukanda is built to fix.
Let's talk
Work with us.
If you are running an AEC firm and losing senior time to proposals, archive searches, or report revisions, we would like to talk. In 30 minutes we will identify whether Wukanda is a fit and which workflow has the clearest ROI.
We do not need access to your files before the first call.