PillarPlus

Overview

PillarPlus combined MEP consulting with software that generated building-services drawings, bills of quantities and cost estimates. Founded in Jaipur in 2019, it joined YC Winter 2020 and reported projects across India and other countries.^[1]

The company attacked a real bottleneck, but the available evidence suggests its software remained bound to expert delivery. YC now labels PillarPlus inactive. Indian corporate records still list the entity active, while co-founder Rushil Mathur operates the related Shreshtha Consultants practice.^[2][3] No source establishes a shutdown, acquisition or transfer.

Founding Story

Naman Kasliwal studied electrical engineering and operations research at IIT Bombay and had built optimization projects for the Indian Army, Mumbai Railways and the Bihar government. Rushil Mathur trained as an architect and worked in MEP design. Their overlap was unusually practical: algorithm design met the rules, drawings and coordination required to make a building usable.^[1]

Kasliwal linked the product to the 2019 Surat fire, which killed students in a commercial building. "We started writing software to monitor law violations in engineering layouts," he wrote later. The rule checker grew into tools that could generate fire, HVAC, electrical and plumbing layouts.^[4]

The founders did not begin with a pure self-serve CAD application. They built an MEP engineering firm whose consultants used automation. That choice supplied project data, expert review and revenue while the algorithms improved. It also made the product harder to separate from services.

Kasliwal described the ambition in a 2021 update: "We are developing software for automatic creation of construction drawings." In the same post, he said PillarPlus had completed more than 260 projects across 40 Indian cities and eight countries.^[5] YC's $150,000 investment financed the early company, according to YourStory.^[6]

Timeline

• 2019: Kasliwal and Mathur founded PillarPlus and began with code-compliance checks.^[1][4]
• Winter 2020: PillarPlus joined YC and raised $150,000.^[6]
• 2021: The founder reported 260 projects across 40 Indian cities and eight countries.^[5]
• 2022: Kasliwal said the firm had expanded to 17 countries and that its fire-layout generator worked in seconds.^[4]
• 2025: Corporate-record aggregation still showed PillarPlus Private Limited as active.^[2]
• 2026: YC displayed an inactive status while Mathur and Shreshtha Consultants continued MEP work.^[1][7]

What They Built

PillarPlus accepted architectural plans and produced the systems layered inside a building: drainage and water supply, HVAC ducts and piping, fire sprinklers and alarms, electrical circuits and panels, data wiring and security layouts. The output included drawings, reports, bills of quantities and cost estimates.^[6]

The automation encoded rules and repeated engineering patterns. A fire layout, for example, had to place equipment against building geometry and applicable codes while coordinating with other services. The software could propose a detailed plan quickly; consultants then supplied judgment and accountability.

That hybrid was both the wedge and the constraint. Customers could buy a completed MEP package rather than learn new software, and the consulting team saw exceptions that could improve the system. Yet each project still carried drawing cleanup, code interpretation, coordination and client revisions. Public sources do not show how much work became truly automatic.

Market Position

Target Customers

PillarPlus sold to architects, contractors, builders, project managers and modular-construction firms. Hotels, apartments, townships, malls and rail projects created enough repeated systems work to benefit from templates and rule checking.

Market Size

No observed source provides a defensible market estimate. The relevant budget sits across MEP design fees, drafting labor, estimating and rework rather than one software category.

Competition

Traditional MEP consultants compete through licenses, reputation and local-code knowledge. Autodesk and other BIM vendors supply authoring systems, while newer design software automates narrow calculations. PillarPlus competed by delivering finished work faster, not by replacing every design environment.