Joist AI Rebrands to Kantiv, Bringing Pursuit Intelligence to AEC Marketing Teams

The Rebrand Marks The Company’s Evolution from Proposal Generation Tool to Firm-Wide Pursuit Intelligence

SAN DIEGO – June 2, 2026 – Kantiv, formerly Joist AI, has rebranded its proposal and business development platform built specifically for AEC marketers, expanding its pursuit intelligence offerings to bring firms strategic insights built on their proposal data. Founded in 2022 as Joist AI, the Kantiv rebrand reflects decades of industry expertise from its founding team, four years of learning alongside more than 200 AEC clients, including 1 in 5 of the ENR Top 50 design firms, and a conviction that AEC marketers deserve more than faster proposals. 

The platform is agentic and works by going beyond database operations, churning out faster proposals, file-organization, and storage, and adding an intelligence layer for AEC marketers to develop better proposals that learn from each win or loss. From the very first upload, the platform extracts the firm's tone, project descriptions, images, client history, and resumes, then organizes, reconciles, and labels the data automatically to ensure data hygiene without manual effort. Data is sorted by project, personnel, client, and sector, with additional options available, bringing both high-level and detailed visibility. Marketing teams can then find critical information by content, topic, or a need tied to an RFP rather than file name, analyze incoming RFPs, generate first drafts grounded in the firm's prior successes and expertise, and run compliance checks before submission. 

Moreover, the platform understands the ins-and-outs of AEC-specific RFPs, and is particularly designed for AEC use cases. Rather than relying on a single model, Kantiv is built for multi-LLM orchestration, routing each task to the best-suited model so customers get the highest-quality output and avoid the default responses, lags, or outages that come from depending on one system. This diversified foundation ensures Kantiv customers receive an interruption-free experience, enabling the company to serve enterprise-level clients like those in the ENR Top 50.

Over time, the platform builds a record of a firm's pursuit history. Marketing leaders can use it to inform go/no-go decisions, identify which markets the firm is winning in, track where project experience is aging, and spot patterns in past wins and losses. The intelligence layer provides automated data governance, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and contextual grounding through an AEC lens. Ultimately, Kantiv allows AEC marketers to tie themselves to data and surface years of institutional knowledge.

"AEC marketers are among the most talented, most overlooked teams in the industry. We started this company to change that," said Rohan Jawali, CEO and Co-Founder of Kantiv. "When pursuit teams can access everything their firm knows, they spend less time searching and more time winning. And when marketers get that time back, they can reach further to see around corners and pursue the right work with real strategy.”

"For marketers with deep institutional knowledge and an ever-growing inbox, this is like a second brain that you can share with your whole organization,” shared Joey Sminchak, Communications Manager at Horner & Shifrin Inc and Joist AI, now Kantiv, customer. “Not only is the platform a space to store your information, it's the key to unlocking that information and improving your win strategy."

The rebrand reflects a change in how the company defines its category. Since launching as Joist AI in 2022, the company has extended the platform's scope beyond proposal generation into pursuit analytics and business development decision-making. The new name is intended to reflect what the platform delivers rather than how it is built. Kantiv remains an AI-native company but has moved away from AI as a brand identifier, noting that AI capabilities have become standard across the software industry, while AI data intelligence has not. As the industry evolves, data intelligence is emerging as a core competency for AEC marketing leaders.

The name Kantiv is derived from the cantilever, a structural form in which a beam extends into open space, carried by the strength of its anchored base rather than by anything beneath its reach.Co-founder and CEO Rohan Jawali, a former Hensel Phelps engineer, chose the name to reflect the platform's premise: that a firm's accumulated institutional knowledge, proposals, and client history can serve as the foundation from which its marketing team extends further into new markets and project types.

Along with a logo change, inspired by the right angles of a cantilever, the company is moving its domain from joist.ai to kantiv.com.

‍About Kantiv

Kantiv builds pursuit intelligence for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) marketing and business development teams. The platform connects a firm's institutional knowledge, proposals, project data, and client history into an intelligent system that works at every stage of the pursuit lifecycle. Founded by people who came up through AEC marketing and know firsthand what it costs when a talented team spends its best hours on a scramble instead of a strategy, Kantiv exists to give AEC marketers the foundation they need to win the right work and earn their seat at the table. Founded in 2022, the company is headquartered in San Diego, California. For more information, visit kantiv.com.