Roderick Bates, who leads product operations at Chaos (the company behind V-Ray and Enscape), hosts Startup Conversations on CGconnect, Chaos's community platform for design and visualization professionals. For the latest episode he sat down with Marissa Ritchen, Kestrel's Chief Industry Officer and a licensed architect (AIA, RA, NCARB), for an hour-long conversation about the technology reshaping BIM and the state of the AEC industry. He booked the interview after asking Architosh's editor-in-chief which technology stood out most at AIA26. The answer was Kestrel.
The conversation opens where Kestrel's story starts: “No one gets into architecture with a passion for code compliance,” Marissa says. Yet compliance consumes an enormous share of design time, and the profession has largely accepted that as the cost of practicing. Kestrel was founded on the opposite premise: the most frustrating part of designing a building should not be proving it follows the rules.
Is code compliance a negotiation?
Bates opened with a challenge. A New York real estate lawyer once told him that in code compliance, “everything is a negotiation.” So how can software automate a negotiation? Marissa's answer draws the line that runs through Kestrel's whole approach: most of a building code is not interpretive at all. Egress widths, turning radii, ADA clearances, fire separations: the model either meets the requirement or it does not.
“If 80% of compliance is black and white, then you provide those things, and that 20% leaves you this wonderful array of levers to push and pull.”
Automate the black and white, and the interpretive 20% stops being a threat to the design and becomes design leverage. “If you know enough about the code constrictions early, it doesn't rob you of your design,” she says. “It's not a roadblock. It's a tool to be wielded.”
The third generation of code compliance tools
Marissa frames the industry's tooling in three generations. First came digitized code books: searchable text, but the checking stayed manual. Then 2D plan review: software reading static drawings after the design is done. The third generation reads the BIM model itself, evaluating the data architects already put into Revit against the code while the design is still moving. That is what Kestrel builds, and why checking can happen inside the model instead of at a review milestone.
Trust runs through that answer, because architecture is a liability profession. “If you run it a thousand times, you are going to get the exact same result a thousand times,” Marissa says, and the results are grounded in licensed code text through Kestrel's collaboration with the ICC. Just as important, the platform reports what it did not check. It never says “you passed.” It says which requirements were evaluated, and against which code sections.
Real-time feedback is a learning tool
The old workflow is static: print a PDF set at a milestone, hand it to a reviewer, wait. Kestrel's is conversational. “It's not move a door, get a violation popup,” Marissa says. “It's: I've completed this thought. Let me make sure it works the way I think it does.” Because every finding is tied to both a model element and a specific code section, younger architects learn the code as they design instead of discovering it in redlines. The point is not replacing junior staff. It is giving every option a designer sketches a chance to already work.
The full hour covers much more: why "you built a spreadsheet" is the sharpest insult in architecture, what a 3D plan check could mean for permit review, and how compliance knowledge compounds across a firm's projects. Watch it above, or on CGconnect's YouTube channel →
Want to see the third generation in practice? Schedule a demo →