Cascade raises $3.5m seed to bring AI project prediction to AEC firms
Cascade, a New York-based AI startup serving architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms, has raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun. Additional investors include Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC. The company says the capital will be used to accelerate platform adoption and expand its network of AEC firms across the United States.
The platform, called Pursuit Hub, is designed to surface project opportunities before they reach formal procurement. Cascade ingests signals from bond filings, capital plans, property transactions, permits, budget announcements and earnings transcripts, and maps them to likely construction opportunities. The company says it has already surfaced more than $10 billion in project opportunities for clients working on infrastructure including JFK and LaGuardia airports, data centres and nuclear facilities.
What the platform does
Cascade scores each opportunity for fit, helping firms prioritise the work they are most likely to win, and surfaces relationship paths by integrating with tools such as Outlook. Co-founder and CTO Joana Ferreira, a former early engineer at a large retail trading platform and previously an AI lead at UnlikelyAI, drew a direct analogy to quantitative finance: "Hedge funds look at a crazy amount of data to predict stock movements. We use the same logic to predict construction projects."
Co-founder and CEO Hannia Zia, who served as VP of Product at UnlikelyAI, the startup founded by the inventor of Amazon Alexa, described the platform's core proposition: "Find the right work early, understand where you have a real advantage, and turn that into revenue delivered." Both founders have family backgrounds in construction, which the company credits for their understanding of how the industry operates on relationships and institutional knowledge.
Marcus Segal, investor at Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, said the fund was drawn to the revenue-problem framing: "Construction is one of the largest markets in the world, and the way firms find and win work has barely changed in decades. Cascade starts with a painful revenue problem. That is a powerful wedge into how construction work gets pursued, partnered on and delivered."
Market context
The AEC software market is increasingly contested. Established players such as Autodesk and Procore dominate project delivery and document management, but the business-development and pre-bid intelligence layer has historically been served by manual research, industry directories and personal networks. A cluster of AI-native startups is now targeting this gap, applying large-language-model and graph-based approaches to fragmented public data sources.
The construction sector is a substantial addressable market: global construction output is estimated to exceed $13 trillion annually, yet productivity growth has lagged most other industries for decades, a dynamic that has made it a recurring target for enterprise software investment. Network-effect dynamics, where a platform becomes more valuable as more firms join and contribute pursuit data, are a credible moat in this category if Cascade can sustain early momentum.
From a regulatory standpoint, the platform's use of public filings, capital plans and property records does not appear to raise immediate data-compliance concerns, though integration with email and CRM systems will require firms to satisfy themselves on GDPR obligations where European project data is involved. The company has not disclosed pricing, contract terms or annualised recurring revenue figures at this stage.
Cascade was founded in 2025 and has so far attracted named clients including Munoz Engineering, FORGE Architecture and S.A. Casey Construction. The company said its next milestones are broadening US coverage and deepening teaming-match capabilities for firms looking for bid partners across regions.