A 30-Year Construction Veteran Built an AI That Checks If Your Estimate Is Fair. Now It Runs as an AI Plugin, Backed by Four Public Research Papers.

The HORIZ音s Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; founder and CEO: Toshikatsu Oga) has released HORIZON SHIELD, an AI service that checks whether a construction or renovation estimate is fair, as a plugin accessible from conversational AI. Alongside the release, the company has published four research working papers on buyer-side construction verification through the research repository SSRN.

From launch to the next stage

In April 2026, the company launched HORIZON SHIELD on the belief that homeowners lose money not because contractors are dishonest, but because of an information gap. A homeowner who receives a quote has had no reliable way to judge whether the price is fair.

The service is now available as a plugin for conversational AI, so the fairness of a construction price can be queried directly through an AI. A person no longer has to carry a paper quote around. An AI can check, on the homeowner's behalf, whether a price is reasonable.

Why this verification can be trusted: four public research papers

The company's method is not an ad hoc feature. Founder Toshikatsu Oga has organized the single problem of buyer-side construction verification into four working papers, published openly on SSRN:

- Verification for the Buyer, Not the Seller: A Deployed Construction-Quote Gate
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6964439

- Reducing Information Asymmetry in Credence-Good Markets: A Third-Party Verified Quote (VRQ) Framework for Residential Renovation
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6807738

- Benchmarking Frontier Large Language Models on Consumer-Facing Cost Questions
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6872819

- JCCDB v1.2: Cryptographic Audit Hash and Macroeconomic Price Correction for Reproducible LLM-Based Construction Cost Diagnostics
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6738701

Theory, deployment, measurement, and a data foundation. These four directions together form the basis of "verification for the buyer." The company is built on both 30 years of on-site experience and openly published research. (These are working papers publicly available on SSRN. They are not peer-reviewed.)

Verifiable, in a form you can verify yourself

The company's construction price database, JCCDB, is open data published with a DOI. Each diagnostic result carries a verification hash, and the methodology is time-stamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps, so anyone can recompute and confirm the result afterward. This is the core idea: not "trust me," but "you can check this yourself."

Toshikatsu Oga became a carpenter at 15 and worked for 30 years as a site supervisor and construction manager, reviewing several hundred estimates. He is registered as a researcher with ORCID (0009-0000-9180-903X), grounding the service in both field experience and open research.

Not a single inflated number

The company does not promise outcomes. A diagnosis can be wrong. What it commits to is handing the homeowner the material to judge, and a way to verify the result afterward, honestly. That is what closing the information gap has meant since April, and it has not changed.

Availability

Service: HORIZON SHIELD
URL: https://shield.the-horizons-innovation.com
Free preliminary AI diagnosis available

References:
Service: https://shield.the-horizons-innovation.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-9180-903X

The HORIZ音s Inc.
Toshikatsu Oga (Founder and CEO / Press contact)
Minami-Aoyama 2-2-15, Win Aoyama 942, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062, Japan
Phone: +81-463-74-5917
Email: contact@the-horizons-innovation.com

The HORIZ音s Inc. is a Japanese company founded in 2022 by Toshikatsu Oga, who became a carpenter at 15 and spent 30 years on construction sites as a supervisor and construction manager. The company builds buyer-side tools that close the information gap between contractors and homeowners in construction and renovation. Its flagship service, HORIZON SHIELD, is an AI construction cost diagnostic grounded in open research and verifiable records.

This release was published on openPR.