1991 → today.
A timeline of every product Vertigraph has shipped and the milestones that mattered, from the 1991 founding to this year’s change in ownership.
- 1991Founding
Erich Schoenkopf founds Vertigraph in Dallas.
February 25, 1991A former Deloitte CPA turned NASDAQ-conglomerate CFO, Erich raises angel funding and acquires the source code and rights to BidWorx — a DOS takeoff and estimating package serving commercial contractors. The bet: estimators want their tool built around the spreadsheet, not against it.
- 1994Founding
Down to one person.
Late 1994Three years in, the business is Erich. Angel investors are owed money, the DOS market is dying under his feet, and the product needs a Windows rewrite from scratch. Rather than fold, he posts on a CompuServe developer forum looking for someone who can pull it off.
- 1995Product launch
Ken Bailey joins. BidWorx for Windows ships.
Excel1995Ken Bailey — MIT-trained, writing software out of Maine — answers the CompuServe post and comes on for an ownership stake plus a share of revenues. The Erich-and-Ken partnership ships BidWorx for Windows the same year: a relational database wired into Excel-compatible takeoff sheets. Every Vertigraph product since follows that pattern.
- 1997Product launch
BidPoint launches as a standalone product.
1997Digitizer-tablet takeoff for the rapidly growing spreadsheet estimating market. Estimators trace paper plans on a tablet; quantities land directly in Excel. Orders start coming in from all fifty states and overseas.
- 1999Product launch
BidPoint XL debuts inside Microsoft Excel.
Excel1999The first software to add digitizer takeoff directly inside Excel itself. BidPoint XL becomes the industry standard for paper-plan digitizing — and after eight lean years, Vertigraph turns its first profit.
- 2001Product launch
BidScreen XL goes on-screen. Kim Border joins.
Excel2001BidScreen XL is the first product to measure on-screen from PDF and CAD files directly in Excel — paper plans start giving way to digital drawing sets, and Vertigraph is already there. The same year, Kim Border joins to run operations and support. Erich, Ken, and Kim run the company together for the next two and a half decades.
- 2007Product launch
SiteWorx/OS brings 3D earthwork to the estimator's desk.
2007The first software to calculate excavation quantities on-screen from PDFs. Civil and site contractors model cut and fill without buying survey-grade CAD. By this point, a slice of nearly every U.S. commercial project over $1M is being bid on Vertigraph software.
- 2013Product launch
Drawing Compare catches revisions.
April 2013Built to isolate the actual changes in a revised drawing set. Estimators stop re-bidding the whole package every time the GC issues an addendum.
- 2016Major release
BidScreen XL v8 and SiteWorx/OS v8 ship.
March 2016A platform refresh across the flagship products — modernized rendering, broader file format support, the foundation the next decade of releases is built on.
- 2026Acquisition
AJ Backlund and Mark Schwab acquire Vertigraph.
April 24, 2026New ownership takes the helm — AJ, a working civil estimator, and Mark, founder of CivilTakeoff.ai — extending Vertigraph’s four-product legacy onto a modern platform. Day one, nothing changes for existing customers. From here, the toolchain modernizes.
The next chapter starts now.
New ownership, same support team, same four products, plus a modern customer portal, automated license provisioning, and a refreshed marketing and product catalog shipping through 2026.