Shackleton AI Raises $5M Seed Led by Battery Ventures for Construction AI Agents
New York startup Shackleton AI has raised a $5 million seed round led by Battery Ventures to build what it calls an agentic operating system for construction and real estate development. The round was announced on 4 November 2026.
The platform launched in June 2026 and already manages more than $1 billion in project value across over 15 US states, the company says. Its AI agents handle the paperwork that fills a project manager's week, such as drafting requests for information, chasing overdue submittals and turning field notes into daily reports.
Deal summary
Company | Shackleton AI |
Headquarters | New York, USA |
Sector | Construction tech, AI agents |
Round | Seed |
Amount | $5M |
Lead investor | Battery Ventures |
Other investors | Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, Silence VC and others |
Co-founders | Michael Ragheb (CEO), Hassan Yasin, Olexandr Kaltsev |
Product launch | June 2026 |
Project value on platform | $1B+ across 15+ states |
Announced | 4 November 2026 |
What Shackleton AI does
Shackleton replaces the stack of separate tools that construction teams use to run a project. It brings development, preconstruction, project and field management, finance and communications into one system, covering a project from site selection through to handover.
On top of that shared data, AI agents take on the routine admin. According to the company, they can:
draft requests for information (RFIs), the formal questions contractors send to architects and engineers
follow up on overdue submittals, the drawings, samples and specs that must be approved before work starts
flag budget variances before a payment request is approved
turn field notes into daily reports
People stay in control through review and approval steps, so an agent's work is checked before it goes out.
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The target customers are midsize general contractors working on multifamily, industrial and commercial projects, plus brands that build out many locations. Named customers include restaurant chains Red Lobster, Dog Haus and Pepper Lunch.
Co-founder Michael Ragheb says multi-location customers have finished buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and up to 18% under budget. Those figures come from the company and have not been independently verified.
"Consolidating our communication and project tracking on Shackleton has kept us on track and on schedule," said Andi Cramer, senior director of construction and rebuild at Red Lobster.
The problem: too many tools, too much admin
Shackleton says construction and development teams often juggle 7 to 10 separate systems and spend 10 to 15 hours a week on data entry and admin.
Industry research points the same way. A widely cited 2018 study by PlanGrid and consultancy FMI surveyed 600 construction professionals and found:
Finding | Figure |
Time spent on non-productive tasks | About 35% of working time, or roughly 14 hours per person per week |
Time spent searching for project data | About 5.5 hours per week |
Time spent on stakeholder disagreements | Nearly 5 hours per week |
Time spent on mistakes that need rework | Nearly 4 hours per week |
Rework caused by poor communication | 26% of rework, about $17B a year |
Rework caused by poor project information | 22% of rework, about $14.3B a year |
Total annual cost of these issues | More than $177B |
The study is several years old, but the pattern it describes, scattered data and manual follow-ups, is the same one Shackleton is pitching against.
"Every hour a project manager spends chasing status across disconnected tools is margin lost," said Ragheb, Shackleton's co-founder and CEO.
Who backed the round, and who is building it
Battery Ventures led the round. Michael Brown, a general partner at the firm, framed the bet in simple terms: "Construction is one of the largest and least digitized sectors in the economy."
The investor list leans towards specialists in the built environment and early-stage software:
Battery Ventures (lead): a global technology investment firm that backs software and infrastructure companies.
Brick & Mortar Ventures: a venture firm focused on construction and the built environment.
Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures and Silence VC, among others.
The founding team has run construction projects themselves. Michael Ragheb (CEO), Hassan Yasin and Olexandr Kaltsev previously grew Ernest, a tech-enabled commercial general contractor, to $35 million in annual revenue across the Southeastern US. That gives them first-hand experience of the admin problems Shackleton is built to remove.
Shackleton says it will use the money to expand the workflows its agents can handle and to speed up its go-to-market push.
Where Shackleton fits in construction tech
Construction software is not a new market, and large players already exist.
Milestone | What happened |
Nov 2018 | Autodesk agreed to buy PlanGrid, the app that moved construction blueprints onto the iPad, for $875M. PlanGrid had 12,000 customers at the time |
May 2021 | Procore, a construction management platform, priced its IPO on the NYSE at $67 a share, raising about $634M in its base offering |
Jun 2026 | Shackleton launched its agent-based platform |
Nov 2026 | Shackleton raised a $5M seed led by Battery Ventures |
Those earlier companies mainly digitised documents and workflows: plans moved from paper to tablets, and project records moved into the cloud. Shackleton's pitch is the next step. Instead of giving people a better place to do the admin, it wants software agents to do much of the admin for them, across every stage of a project. It is one of several agent-focused startups to raise money this week, alongside Phaze, which gives AI agents their own computers to work on.
Its early customers, midsize general contractors and brands building out many locations, tend to run several projects at once. For them, admin hours saved on each job add up across the portfolio.
What to watch next
New agent workflows. The funding is meant to widen what Shackleton's agents can do. Watch for which tasks are added next, especially in finance and preconstruction.
Customer results. The 35% faster and 18% cheaper buildout figures are company claims. Case studies with named projects would make them easier to judge.
Growth beyond restaurants. Red Lobster, Dog Haus and Pepper Lunch are all food brands. Wins in multifamily, industrial and commercial building would show the platform working across project types.
Trust in agents. Construction has real money and safety at stake. How customers use the human review step, and how often they override agents, will shape adoption.
Competition. Established construction platforms could add similar AI features. Shackleton will need to show that an agent-first system beats AI added onto existing tools.