Candid Intelligence

Candid Intelligence is an artificial intelligence company building an internal AI agent builder for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) projects and owner-operators. The company describes itself as building “the AI layer for EPCs and owner operators,” applying AI to reduce the manual effort behind preconstruction engineering by automating document understanding, consistency checks and repetitive workflow steps across major engineering disciplines.

The company’s stated goal is to make preconstruction ten times faster without sacrificing engineering quality. Its platform is built around automating the mechanical engineering tasks that slow projects down: reading drawings, comparing datasheets, reviewing vendor packages, coordinating with other disciplines and closing out tasks. Candid positions this work as compressing pre-FEED and FEED schedules by more than 30 percent while maintaining full engineering quality, delivered by senior engineers on top of software built around how the work actually gets done.

Candid focuses on behind-the-meter gas-fired power generation and related capital projects. Its active pipeline has been described as spanning 200 MW to 2.4 GW behind-the-meter gas projects serving AI factories, hyperscale data centers and gas-to-nuclear bridge architectures across Texas and the Gulf Coast. The company also references work across power generation, gas-to-power, LNG, midstream and downstream projects, covering combined-cycle and simple-cycle gas plants, cogeneration and behind-the-meter campuses for data centers.

The company’s product and AI team works with domain engineers to turn real pre-FEED and FEED workflows into automation targets, aiming to reduce tasks that take hundreds of hours today to a fraction of that time. Engineers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon work alongside senior process, electrical, mechanical and piping engineers who validate deliverables and define the checks that the platform automates.

Candid Intelligence was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with a presence in Houston, Texas, reflecting the concentration of EPC and owner-operator activity in the power and LNG sectors. The company has raised $6.5 million from AI and industrial investors, including Schneider Electric and Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. Its team is described as including engineers with backgrounds at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, major LNG and power projects, and leading EPCs.

Candid’s clients and counterparts are EPC firms and owner-operators in power generation, gas-to-power, LNG, midstream and downstream, along with project development managers, VPs of projects and heads of engineering. The company positions its engineering practice as a peer to established EPC incumbents on FEED bids and as a counterparty to client executives and lenders.

On working culture, Candid describes itself as a lean startup with no bureaucracy, favoring shipping and iterating over lengthy approval processes. Employee benefits cited in job listings include unlimited PTO, medical, dental and vision insurance, daily lunch and dinner at the office, a health and wellness reimbursement, and startup equity. The company describes its mission as fixing the inefficiencies that repeat across every capital project by building AI tools around deep domain expertise.