About CASA Labs

CASA Labs was founded by Dmitriy Ritz in Los Angeles. Before CASA, Dmitriy built the systems small construction and automotive businesses run on: a CRM for a commercial roofing contractor that tracks contacts, properties, jobs and invoices, plus the websites and lead pipelines that feed it.

That work kept surfacing the same problem. Operations teams lose hours to documents, handoffs and re-entry, and the AI tools that could help want their data in someone else’s cloud. CASA Labs exists to close that gap: automation that fits how a team already works and runs on infrastructure the operator controls.

CASA Labs, legally California Structural Algorithms Labs, is the research division of CASA. The lab studies applied AI for the built world: construction, infrastructure, and related sectors. It does research only and does not take client work. It seeks grant funding for its studies.

The lab focuses on a problem that keeps surfacing in built-world operations. Work runs on manual, document-heavy processes that AI could help with, yet many organizations cannot send their operational data to public AI services. The goal is methods and systems that work inside environments operators control.

Research questions come from real field problems. Each study will start with a workflow an operator actually runs, define what a measurable improvement would look like, and test whether AI can deliver it.

The systems we study will run inside infrastructure the operator owns: on-premise hardware or a private cloud instance the operator manages. Operational data will stay there, and studies are designed to fit a range of security postures.

The lab will publish methods and findings so others can check the work and build on it.

Reality-driven

We study and build automation only where there is a clear, measurable operational advantage. If a manual process already works, we leave it alone. Where we can, we will run inside the channels teams already use rather than forcing new interfaces on them.

Operational data as a research subject

Construction projects produce a steady stream of routine data: daily logs, RFIs, change orders, meeting minutes. Most of it is filed and never read again. The lab asks what that data can reveal about how projects actually run: where work stalls, where risk builds, and where a process could be made safer. The data stays inside the operator’s environment.

California Structural Algorithms Labs is the research division of CASA. Commercial work, including websites and AI automation for businesses, is done by CASA Media.

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