Albi Acquires Oak Estimates to Drive AI-Powered Estimating and Collections

Albi, a platform purpose-built for the restoration industry, completed the acquisition of Oak Estimates, a professional estimating and collections services company founded by industry veteran Alex Dahlgard. This marks a defining milestone in Albi’s mission to propel the restoration industry forward by evolving its platform from a system of record into a system of action.

The acquisition brings Oak Estimates’ team of expert estimators in-house at Albi, where they will continue to operate as a dedicated professional services group serving restoration contractors. This reflects Albi’s belief that breakthrough products are built through close collaboration between engineers, restoration operators, and industry experts.

Building on this foundation, Albi will develop AI-powered estimating tools trained on the real-world expertise of these world-class estimators, with the goal of helping restoration companies produce higher-quality estimates and collect payment faster.

Collections and receivables remain among the most persistent and painful challenges facing restoration contractors. While a number of solutions have attempted to apply AI to estimate writing, many have struggled with accuracy, producing unreliable output that fails to meet the high standards contractors and carriers demand.

“Our estimators and contractors hold AI to a higher standard than they hold their own employees, and rightly so,” said Alex Duta, Albi CEO. “The reason AI has struggled in our industry is that it lacks the context and the guardrails to produce trustworthy results. Albi’s competitive advantage is structured data: through Albi Scans, our Xactimate integration, documentation, notes, and more, we have the foundation to train AI on the specific use cases and edge cases that matter. While our competitors are taking data and giving it to the carriers, we’re pointing the data back to benefit our customers, restorers. What we were missing was the engine, the world-class estimators who define what excellence looks like. That is exactly what Oak Estimates brings.”

The relationship between Albi and Alex Dahlgard spans nearly seven years. Dahlgard previously served as general manager of Ercolano Cleaning and Restoration, an early and enthusiastic Albi client. After Ercolano was acquired, Dahlgard set out to solve one of restoration’s biggest problems, helping contractors collect money and get paid faster, and founded Oak Estimates. The two organizations worked closely together over the following
years, frequently referring customers to one another, before formally beginning acquisition discussions in October 2025.

“This was the natural coming together of two teams that share the same vision. I believe deeply in what Albi is building,” Dahlgard said. “We realized there were tremendous synergies between the Oak team and the Albi team. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

Under the combined organization, Albi’s expanded estimating services team will continue onboarding contractors and delivering best-in-class results, with a benchmark of collecting in under 15 days. Concurrently, Albi will build AI tools that learn directly from how its world-class estimators work, allowing those estimators to beta-test, refine, and ultimately supervise the technology.

Because Albi’s estimators remain on the front line, they will be able to flag changes in carrier requirements and updates to Xactimate in real time, continuously defining the guardrails of what world-class estimating looks like. This human-in-the-loop model is designed to keep Albi’s AI both highly accurate and consistently reliable. The combined expertise of Albi and Oak Estimates will help shape future innovations designed to improve the speed, quality, and consistency of estimating and collections for restoration contractors.