Company: Zebel
Founder CEO: Hamid Hajian
Website: https://zebel.io/
About Zebel
Zebel is a modern preconstruction SaaS platform founded in 2019 by former preconstruction manager Hamid Hajian. Growing up in a family construction business and managing multifamily project estimates at major California builders, Hamid experienced firsthand the fragility and inefficiency of running eight- and nine-figure building decisions out of scattered Excel spreadsheets. Determined to solve this industry-wide data problem, he bootstrapped Zebel from scratch, funding the initial version by cashing out his own retirement savings without taking any venture capital.
While venture-backed competitors raised tens of millions of dollars to build buzz, Zebel quietly focused on product maturity, customer trust and real operational outcomes. Over seven years, Zebel has grown into a profitable SaaS powerhouse serving premier general contractors and real estate developers across North America, including Amazon, Irvine Company, UrbanCore Construction and Camden Property Trust.
Zebel transforms preconstruction by turning scattered project history into a structured, centralised cost database. Rather than relying on fragile spreadsheet templates, preconstruction teams use Zebel to build parametric conceptual budgets, produce detailed estimates and perform sub bid levelling within a single cloud platform. Every number in Zebel traces back to real historical cost data. Additionally, Zebel provides opt-in AI oversight agents that automatically review estimates to catch scope gaps, unit cost anomalies and formula errors before bid day.
The impact on the SaaS ecosystem and the construction industry is proven by hard customer results. For example, Virginia general contractor UrbanCore Construction reduced conceptual estimate turnaround times from three to five days down to under three hours. This massive gain in team capacity allowed UrbanCore to deliver 78 per cent more estimates with the same team size while maintaining budget variance within 300 thousand dollars on a 16 million dollar estimate.
By proving that a bootstrapped SaaS company can out-innovate venture-funded rivals, Zebel represents a new era of operator-led software designed specifically for the needs of construction professionals.
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