Cascade raises $3.5M to predict construction projects before public launch

Cascade has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, the accelerator program from a16z. The London-based startup, which also has a New York presence, sells AI software that it says helps architecture, construction and engineering firms identify projects before they are publicly live.

The round also included Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC. Cascade did not disclose its valuation, revenue, customer count or headcount.

Founded by Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, Cascade is targeting a specific pain point in construction and engineering sales: firms often learn about major projects only after competitors have already built relationships, shaped requirements or positioned for procurement. Cascade says its system reads early signals across bond filings, permits, capital plans, property transactions, earnings transcripts, budget announcements and meeting minutes.

The company claims that approach can point clients toward projects before those opportunities appear in conventional sales pipelines. Cascade says it has identified more than $10 billion in project opportunities for customers, including companies involved in work for JFK and LaGuardia airports. It did not say how much of that pipeline converted into awarded contracts or revenue for clients.

Former Google operators, construction sales problem

Zia and Ferreira are both former Google operators. They met at UnlikelyAI, the startup founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, who co-created Amazon Alexa.

Cascade’s pitch fits a broader pattern in applied AI funding: investors are backing vertical software that uses large volumes of public or semi-public data to make commercial teams earlier and more targeted. In this case, the category is less about generating content and more about detecting weak signals across fragmented documents that construction and engineering firms already monitor through manual work.

That makes the startup’s claimed edge measurable, at least in principle. For customers, the relevant metric is not the number of opportunities surfaced, but whether earlier visibility leads to more qualified bids, higher win rates or better-margin work. Cascade has not disclosed those performance metrics.

The company says it will use the new capital to expand its network and accelerate adoption of its technology. That is standard seed-stage language, and the round size puts Cascade in the early commercial validation phase rather than a scale-up phase.

The investor syndicate gives Cascade access to venture networks in the U.S. and Europe, useful for a company selling into large, relationship-heavy construction and engineering accounts. The next test is whether its AI-generated project intelligence becomes a budgeted workflow for business development teams, or remains another lead source competing with consultants, databases and in-house research.

This story draws on original reporting from Tech.eu.