About Philo Ventures

Philo Ventures is a venture studio based in Utah. We back founder-led companies with cash, IP, sweat equity, and shared services through our studio programs — taking companies from concept to Seed-ready spinout in 12–18 months, versus the industry average of 3-plus years solo. Our full-stack studio team of 0-to-1 builders covers engineering, design, product strategy, GTM, legal, and finance.

One of the highest-leverage things we do is help great founders find the right co-founders. That is exactly the moment Covellum is in.

Covellum is an AI-powered pre-construction cost intelligence platform that gives architects, developers, lenders, and owner-developers instant, accurate, localized construction cost estimates early in the development process — before the expensive, time-consuming re-scoping cycles that happen when GC bids come back over budget. We are in active diligence with design partners including major architecture firms, institutional owner-developers, and construction lenders, and we are moving fast.

The founder behind Covellum is searching for the right technical co-founder to build with. Together, the founding team will work to enter Philo's Build program — our 10-month, invite-only studio portco relationship for founders who are committed to an idea and ready to build the company, with Philo as an operational partner and full access to studio funding and resources.

The construction industry is a $2 trillion market in the U.S. alone, and it still runs on gut instinct, relationship-based estimates, and spreadsheets. Covellum is built to change that.

The Role

As the Technical Co-Founder of Covellum, you will own the product and the technology end-to-end. This is a founder role, with all the ambiguity, ownership, and upside that implies. You will work directly with the Philo studio team, a commercial co-founder, and our network of investors, industry experts, and design partners to take Covellum from early prototype to a system that real customers trust with real decisions.

This role is expected to evolve into a permanent technical leadership position, likely CTO, as Covellum scales. We are looking for someone who wants to own the technical and product vision long-term — not just ship the first version.

What You'll Do

• Own the technical and product vision. Make the core calls on stack, data model, agent orchestration, retrieval strategy, and infrastructure — and on what the product actually is. Decide what to build, what to buy, and what to defer. You are the architect of record and the product mind behind the system.

• Design the agentic core. Covellum is an agentic product. You will design how agents ingest plans, query cost data, reason about scope and assumptions, and produce defensible estimates — including the orchestration, tool use, memory, and evaluation layers underneath.

• Build the data layer. Construction cost intelligence is a data problem before it's an AI problem. You will design the pipelines, schemas, and storage (relational, vector, geospatial) that let Covellum produce localized, accurate estimates and improve over time.

• Ship the 0-to-1 product. Drive the build to first paying customers. Philo's engineering team builds alongside you — you are not the lone engineer trying to ship everything yourself. As Covellum scales, transition from primary builder to engineering leader without losing technical depth.

• Translate customer reality into the system. Sit in design partner calls. Understand what an architect, a developer, or a construction lender actually does with cost data, and translate that into a product they trust. You are the technical voice in every customer conversation and the customer voice in every technical conversation.

• Build the engineering team. Recruit the founding engineers when the time is right. Set the bar for technical hiring, code quality, and how the team works.

• Drive technical strategy. Stay ahead of the model, infrastructure, and tooling landscape. Make sure Covellum is building durable advantages, not just riding the current wave of AI capability.

What You Get

• Meaningful equity in the company you are building. Real co-founder ownership, structured so your upside scales with what you build.

• Studio firepower behind you. A Philo engineering team that writes code alongside you — not just advises — plus design, product strategy, GTM, legal, finance, and pre-seed capital. You move at studio speed without paying studio drag.

• Structured coaching. Weekly accountability sessions, Founders Forum, and direct office hours with studio leadership. Opinionated guidance from operators who have done this before; the call is still yours.

• A bridge to your raise. Living-wage salary during the build phase, drawn from the capital your concept secures, with compensation and equity refined as Covellum raises its first institutional round. Health, dental, and standard Philo portfolio perks included.

What We're Looking For

• Founder mentality. An obsessive sense of ownership, a bias for action, and the ability to make good decisions with incomplete information. You want to build a company, not just contribute to one.

• A strong product mind. You think in products, not just systems. You have opinions about what separates an AI product that customers trust from a demo that impresses on a stage. You understand that agentic products live or die on UX, trust, latency, failure modes, and edge cases — not just model capability.

• Deep fluency with agentic systems. You have built production systems with LLMs — orchestration, tool use, retrieval, evals, the whole stack. You have strong opinions about where current agent architectures fall apart and how to design around it. You can ship an agent that does real work for a paying customer, not just a wrapper around a prompt.

• Strong database and data architecture chops. Schema design, data modeling, pipelines, vector stores, hybrid retrieval. You have built systems where the data is the moat, not just the wrapper.

• Systems thinker. You think in architectures, not just features. You can sketch the system on a whiteboard, defend the trade-offs, and ship the thing.

• Range from strategy to execution. You can set the technical and product direction.

• Comfort with ambiguity. Covellum is early. The spec will change, the customer will surprise you, and the model landscape will shift under your feet. You are energized by that, not paralyzed by it.

• Domain curiosity. You do not need to be a construction expert, but you need to be genuinely curious about the industry and willing to become fluent in how architects, developers, GCs, and lenders actually work. Bonus if you have built in AEC, proptech, or another regulated, documentation-heavy industry.

Why Join

• Real equity, real upside. You will have meaningful co-founder equity in a company being built with institutional capital and studio support from day one.

• Studio infrastructure behind you. Philo's venture studio handles back-office support (legal, finance, HR), builds alongside you on engineering and design, and connects you to a network of operators and investors — so you can focus on the product, the system, and the customer.

• Active design partners and market pull. We have active conversations with several institutional design partners that are ready to test, inform, adopt and pay when the time is right.

• A technical problem worth solving. Pre-construction cost estimation is a real AI problem — messy plan documents, geographically heterogeneous cost data, scope ambiguity, and decisions made under uncertainty. The team that solves it well becomes the cost intelligence layer for the entire built environment.
  

Division

Philo Studio

Locations

Pleasant Grove, UT

Remote status

Hybrid