Ex-Google duo raise $3.5m for AI construction tracker

Cascade, an artificial intelligence platform built for the architecture, engineering and construction sectors, has closed a $3.5 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun programme. Additional participants in the round include Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC.

The startup targets a persistent blind spot in the building industry: the gap between when a project first generates administrative paperwork and when a public request for proposals is actually issued. Cascade continuously scrapes permits, property transactions, municipal capital plans, budget announcements and meeting minutes to identify developing projects before competitors know they exist.

For European investors, the round underscores how applied AI is moving beyond text generation into highly specific, data-heavy business niches. The construction sector is notoriously slow to digitise, but the financial upside of early intelligence on nine-figure contracts is proving a strong draw for venture capital.

The company was founded by Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, two former Google employees who met at UnlikelyAI, a startup created by William Tunstall-Pedoe, the British engineer credited as a creator of Amazon’s Alexa. Ferreira, who grew up in a Portuguese town built on construction, noted the parallels to high finance. “Hedge funds look at a crazy amount of data to predict stock movements,” she said. “We use the same logic to predict construction projects.”

Early traction supports the premise. Cascade reports its clients have used the platform to surface more than $10 billion in project opportunities, including work on data centres, nuclear reactors and major airports like JFK and LaGuardia. Tim Johannesson, a principal at the luxury architecture firm Smallwood, said Cascade helped his firm secure a $6 million project he would have entirely missed. “I’ve been in the industry for 30 years,” he said. “A project broke ground a few blocks away from me. I didn’t even know it was out for bid.”

Beyond early detection, Cascade is betting on network effects to lock in its market position. Because large projects require dozens of subcontractors, the platform aims to eventually act as a matching layer for partners across regions. Syed Irfan Raza, chief financial officer of Munoz Engineering, noted that Cascade allows his firm to “plan strategically ahead in the highly competitive AEC industry in NYC.” Whether the company can build a defensible network, however, will take time to prove.