Purple Hammer (shapeDo Ltd)

ShapeDo is a venture-backed construction technology company founded in 2014, with offices in Israel and London. It makes two products: ShapeDo, a collaborative design change management platform, and Purple Hammer, a desktop application for construction PDF + spreadsheet operations: viewing, markup, measurement, comparison, takeoff and estimating. Both are built on the company's drawing alignment and visual comparison technology, developed over more than a decade: algorithms that align successive revisions of a construction drawing and make every addition, removal and alteration visible. ShapeDo (the platform) Construction projects run on drawings that change constantly, and information about those changes ends up scattered across PDF tools, spreadsheets, email and document platforms. Teams can usually find the latest drawing; what they struggle to know is exactly what changed since the last revision, who needs to review it, and what it does to quantities, cost and programme. ShapeDo is the project-level, collaborative platform for keeping that under control. Its capabilities include: Automatic comparison of drawing revisions, highlighting exactly what was added, removed or altered between versions Structured review workflows that route each change to the people responsible for assessing it, with assigned actions tracked to closure Design issue logging and RFI management connected directly to the drawings in question A complete, auditable history of drawing versions, reviews and decisions across the life of the project Dashboards and records that show outstanding reviews and unresolved issues at project level ShapeDo is used across the project lifecycle. During tendering and preconstruction, teams use it to identify design movement that affects scope, quantities or price. During delivery, design managers, project managers, commercial teams and consultants use it to coordinate reviews and keep change under control. At the back end of a job, its records support change substantiation, final-account negotiations, claims analysis and dispute resolution, because the project can show precisely what changed, when, why and by whom. Uncaught design changes are among the most common causes of contractor losses; ShapeDo's purpose is to make sure no change goes unseen. Purple Hammer Purple Hammer is a single-user desktop product (macOS and Windows) for the construction industry's daily PDF + spreadsheet operations: viewing, marking up, measuring, comparing and organising drawing sets, and pricing what gets measured. It is built for anyone who spends their working day in construction PDFs, including site engineers and project managers, and it goes deepest for estimators, quantity surveyors, contractors and specialist subcontractors, adding live estimating spreadsheets so that measurement and pricing happen in one native application instead of the usual split between a PDF tool and Excel. Measurements (lengths, areas, perimeters, counts) flow directly into built-in worksheets, where formulas, rates and cost databases turn quantities into a priced estimate. Because takeoff and estimate stay connected, a change in one updates the other. When a revised drawing is issued, Purple Hammer aligns it with the previous version, shows the changed scope, keeps existing measurements intact, and lets the user re-measure and re-price only what changed, rather than starting the takeoff again. The application is engineered for speed on real-world drawing sets: a several-hundred-sheet PDF set opens in roughly a second, automatic alignment and comparison of two revisions typically completes in one to two seconds, and pan and zoom run at 120 frames per second. Its feature set includes markup and annotation, calibrated measurement, automatic drawing alignment, overlays and blink comparison, area and perimeter takeoff, repeated-symbol counting, drawing version history, live estimating worksheets with formulas, and export of marked-up drawings and spreadsheet data. Who uses it General and main contractors, specialist subcontractors, estimators, quantity surveyors, design managers, commercial managers, consultants, project controls teams and construction claims professionals across the AEC industry. In one line each ShapeDo: helps project teams see, review and manage design changes collaboratively, and prove what changed later. Purple Hammer: a fast construction PDF + spreadsheet tool for viewing, markup, measurement and comparison, with estimating built in, so users re-price only what changed when revisions land.