Two UW grads create junior autonomous engineer through Velocity program

Two UW graduates have created a junior autonomous engineer called Sidian AI through the Velocity program that they hope will revolutionize the industry. 

James Hinsberger and Mankirat Singh Sains both graduated from UW’s civil engineering program in 2025 and met through their undergrad. 

“We were both doing the exact job that we are now automating,” Hinsberger explained. “So we have a lot of industry experience and we’ve done exactly this, and we were getting really bored doing it. So we can hopefully help out the next generation and adjust how the workflow proceeds.”

They started Sidian in April 2025, and began consulting, solving one off problems with engineering firms. In September 2025, they transitioned to a web based software product with Sid and began at Velocity about two months later. The team has grown to include Oluwaseun Cardoso, a software engineer who studied computer science and statistics at the University of Toronto and masters at UW. They also employ a UW co-op student for a junior software engineer each term.

“Building for consulting engineers has been a dream come true,” Singh Sains said in a statement. “From watching my father grow a construction business since [I was] a boy, this is always something I knew that I wanted to do. It is fulfilling solving a problem that I had myself only a few months ago, and I look forward to continuing to expand Sidian and helping the industry.”

Sid connects to a firm’s design tools (Excel, Revit, SAP, etc.) with past project data so it can be quickly retrieved and used for new projects. It provides instant access to PDFs, technical drawings, building codes, Word documents, BIM models, and disconnected file systems. The other benefit is that Sid consolidates all work done by engineers into one central location.

Hinsberger estimated that engineers spend about 30 per cent of their time searching for information, validating assumptions, and recreating work that already exists, noting that this would improve their efficiency significantly. 

Sidian improves as it handles more projects, Hinsberger noted.

“It’s still ongoing. The more users interact with it, the stronger the models get,” he said. “We have a general base model, and for each company, the systems can understand how users interact. We build a memory context per user, as well as per company.”

The first phase of Sidian involves structuring data and understanding how each company operates to deliver an information retrieval system. The second phase connects the tools with the first phase to create an operating system that works intelligently with an engineer.

Sid has been used by engineering consultants across Waterloo Region. For example, Brian Waddell, Chief Executive Officer of Waddell Engineering based in Cambridge, noted his team had a great experience working with the Sidian team. “Their combination of engineering knowledge and AI expertise allowed them to integrate tools that directly support our engineering designs and project management system,” Waddell said in a testimonial. “What really stood out was how they tailored everything to our specific needs.” 

Other companies Sidian AI has worked with include Atlantic Industries Limited, Toronto Transit Commission, Co-Elevate, CPE Structural Consultants, Ostan Engineering, and Nahl Engineers.

The Sidian team plans to continue to grow and visit San Francisco, California to meet other companies.