Newforma Buys AI Startup Lumi, Locks It Inside Vojo

Newforma has acquired Toronto-based AI startup Lumi AI, and the deal locks the technology away from everyone except Newforma customers. CEO Peter Cannone confirmed the restriction in an email to Construction Dive. Terms of the transaction, announced Wednesday, were not disclosed.

The acquisition connects Lumi's agentic AI into Vojo, Newforma's AI assistant, which runs on the company's agentic framework. Newforma will integrate the agent into platforms holding more than two decades of project data — RFIs, submittals and communication history.

What does Lumi's engine actually do?

Lumi's AI lets businesses use plain language queries to investigate and uncover patterns in their data. Planned capabilities for Vojo include natural language search and cross-project queries across project data, per the announcement.

That matters for practitioners buried in fragmented records. Cannone said firms' problems do not lie within their tech stacks. Problems occur in the gaps between those tools' interconnections.

"A project spans design software, construction administration, document systems, email and the field, and a firm's real history spans all of it," Cannone said.

In other words, the value proposition is not another tool. It is a single question asked across every tool's residue.

Who joins Newforma, and who stays?

There will be no layoffs at Lumi as a result of the acquisition, Cannone told Construction Dive. Tudor Boiangiu, co-founder and CTO of Lumi AI, has joined Newforma as vice president of AI engineering. The Lumi engineering team will continue to build from Toronto.

"We started Lumi to redefine how people interact with their own data: to make it as simple as asking a question," Ibrahim Ashqar, co-founder and CEO of Lumi AI, said in the announcement. "Newforma brings rich project data and a large base of firms who depend on it. Combining that with Lumi's engine unlocks far greater value for a much wider audience."

Is contech consolidating around project data?

Lumi's acquisition follows a clear pattern among top construction technology firms: buy the intelligence layer, attach it to accumulated project data. Procore acquired vertical AI firm Datagrid in January, then entered an agreement in July to acquire robotics and visual intelligence firm DroneDeploy.

Other recent contech M&A moves include:

• Autodesk's acquisition of Rhumbix in March.
• Trimble's deal to acquire Document Crunch in April.

For firms weighing their information-management stack, the message is blunt. Proprietary data archives — twenty-plus years in Newforma's case — are becoming the substrate that makes acquired AI engines valuable. Vendors that control both the archive and the query layer will decide who gets access. Cannone has already decided: non-customers need not apply.