I built the tool I couldn't find.
After a decade managing design and construction projects, the gap between how organized the work needed to be and how disjointed the tools were kept me up at night. So I built Olumba.
Ugo Mbelu
Founder, Olumba · VP Operations, ICON & IKON
The origin story
Ten years of managing A&E projects and the thing that wore me down wasn't the complexity. It was the tools. Drawings in one place. RFIs buried in email. Submittals tracked in a spreadsheet only I understood. Correction letters floating as Word doc attachments that may or may not have reached the structural engineer.
Every phase had its own disconnected ecosystem, and when something fell through the cracks, it wasn't a minor annoyance. It was a missed plan check deadline. A resubmittal that should have been avoidable. The kind of disorganization a small firm can't absorb.
The enterprise tools existed. Procore, Aconex, BIM 360. They were designed for firms with IT departments and six-figure software budgets. For a 10-person architecture firm, those platforms were architecturally wrong. Too many features built around field operations and billion-dollar GC workflows. Almost nothing for the design phase, which is where firms like mine actually spend their time.
I spent a long time looking for the right tool. It didn't exist. So in 2019, I started building one internally at my firm. What began as a way to stop losing correction letters in email threads became Olumba: a platform for the operators, PMs, and firm leaders who were stuck between spreadsheets and enterprise software that wasn't made for them.
Olumba wasn't born from a market opportunity analysis or a VC pitch. I just couldn't sleep knowing how much better the work could be if the tools matched the reality of running a small firm.
Built at ICON & IKON
Olumba is built and used daily at ICON & IKON, a 10-person design-build architecture firm in Torrance, California. Residential, ADU, multifamily, light commercial. We pull our own permits, manage our own consultants, and run every project on Olumba.
When I ship a feature on Friday, I find out Monday morning whether it actually holds up. A plan check response comes in, a consultant sends back markups, and the feature either works or it doesn't. That feedback loop is about 72 hours, not a quarterly product review.
Why “Olumba”
Two Igbo words. Olu means work. Mba means without. Work without the headache. That's the whole idea.
Your data commitment
Everything is stored on Supabase, which runs on PostgreSQL with row-level security. You own your data. You can export projects, documents, corrections, all of it, whenever you want.
If Olumba shuts down tomorrow, your data doesn't go with it.
Full bulk export is on the roadmap. In the meantime, per-project exports are available from your dashboard.
See it for yourself
Try Olumba Align free. No signup required. Or see how the full platform works.