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Live · docs.airwai.com Last update 2026-05-17

About Airwai

In one sentence

Airwai is a software company building the autonomous civil engineer for critical infrastructure: a software platform that turns inspection data into audit-ready engineering decisions for the people who own the world's pavement, sidewalks, airfields, and right-of-way.

In one paragraph

Civil engineers, airport operators, municipal pavement inspectors, and accessibility consultants spend most of their working lives walking surfaces with clipboards. The result is subjective, slow, hard to audit, and impossibly expensive at scale. Airwai's product, LAIRA (Layered Autonomous Inference and Reasoning Agent), is a software platform that uses an iPhone Pro, an iPad Pro, or a vehicle-mounted rig to capture survey-grade pavement and right-of-way condition data, runs it through a detection pipeline trained on the standards that govern every regulated surface in the United States and Europe, and delivers an ArcGIS feature service to the customer's own tenant — with every output citing the standard it implements. Customers detect 3 to 7 times more anomalies than they would by hand, in half the time, with an audit chain a regulator can defend.

What LAIRA is and is not

LAIRA is software. The platform runs on commercial off-the-shelf hardware: iPhone Pro and iPad Pro for the mobile app, a sensor stack of Ouster LiDAR + Septentrio GNSS + Premio edge compute for the vehicle-mounted rig. Airwai does not manufacture hardware. We integrate.

LAIRA is two surfaces, one platform. The mobile app (what the call center sells) is the entry point and the volume product. The Rig is the enterprise variant for high-traffic federal and AEC customers; the call center does not sell the Rig but does originate Rig leads (+5% commission on close).

Founders + team

  • Amir Emadi — Co-founder, CEO. Builds the company.
  • Buck Jordan — Co-founder, Advisor.
  • Manomit Bal — Director, Software AI. Owns the detection pipeline and product engineering.
  • Austin Wiggins — DevOps.
  • 15+ Albania ML bench — applied research and detection-model training.

Funding + traction

  • Seed round: $3M at $8.5M post-money. ~$2.25M closed; ~$750K remaining as of May 2026.
  • Backers: Unlock Venture Partners (lead), Amplify Ventures (co-lead), Vebu, Gaingels.
  • Non-dilutive: $1.7M Navy SBIR Phase II confirmed.
  • Customers live: San Bernardino International Airport (SBD), live since November 2025 and converting to paid. Wright-Patterson AFB has signed a Letter of Authorization with the 88th Operations Support Squadron and is in a 90-day trial. Hensel Phelps ($7.1B AEC firm, 380+ airport projects) is evaluating LAIRA via DIVERGE.
  • Partnership: Esri (the dominant GIS platform) co-marketing partnership, joint case study, 100% of US airports reachable through the co-sell motion.

Differentiator vs. anything else in the market

Every other product in the field is either a hobbyist scan tool (Polycam, Scaniverse), a generic construction-management workflow (Fieldwire, Bluebeam), a generic aerial-drone platform (DroneDeploy), or a heavy-equipment service (Fugro ARAN, Cyvl, RoadBotics, PaVision). None of them publish how their outputs map to the standards an inspector is legally obligated to follow. LAIRA's compliance matrices are public at docs.airwai.com; every output cites the section of the standard it implements; every inspector who buys the app gets an audit chain on day one.

What "the autonomous civil engineer" means

A civil engineer reads a surface, identifies distresses, classifies them against a standard (D6433, PROWAG, ICAO Annex 14, MUTCD, EN 13036), and produces a record that withstands audit. LAIRA does that work autonomously at scan speed, so the engineer's time goes to the decisions only a human can make. It does not replace the engineer; it replaces the clipboard.

The mission Ergis is being engaged to advance

Get the LAIRA app into the hands of as many practicing field engineers, municipal inspectors, airport ops staff, and accessibility consultants as possible — first in English-speaking markets and the EU, then globally. Build a customer base that compounds through use. Originate the customer relationships that become the basis for the Rig, Enterprise, and federal expansion paths.