Cascade raises $3.5M seed to predict construction projects before they go to tender
July 20, 2026
Cascade, which uses AI to spot construction projects before they are put out to tender, has raised $3.5 million (around £2.6 million) in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun.
Procurement in construction is unusually hard to track. Public bodies and private developers advertise work across a scattering of industry portals and websites, and a good deal of it never gets advertised at all, moving by word of mouth instead. Firms without staff dedicated to monitoring all of this never hear about projects they might have had a real chance of winning.
Cascade scrapes industry portals continuously and, more distinctively, tries to identify work before it is advertised at all. Bond filings, property transactions, county capital plans and housing funding announcements all leave traces of a project taking shape, and the platform models these against who has commissioned and delivered similar work before. It also reads a customer's own network, including LinkedIn connections, to flag opportunities where a relationship already exists. Further agents draft proposals, surface issues buried in project specifications and check submissions for code compliance. Co-founder and CTO Joana Ferreira likens the method to quantitative finance: hedge funds read enormous quantities of data to anticipate price movements, and Cascade points the same logic at buildings.
Launched in 2025, the company has signed around 20 architecture, engineering and construction customers whose portfolios take in JFK and LaGuardia airports, data centres, nuclear facilities and luxury hotels, and says it has surfaced more than $10 billion of potential project value. Tim Johannesson, a principal at architecture firm Smallwood, said Cascade had led his team to a $6 million project he would not otherwise have found.
Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC joined the round. Co-founders Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira met at UnlikelyAI, the neuro-symbolic AI company founded by one of the architects of Amazon Alexa, and both grew up around family construction businesses. The money will fund go-to-market work and engineering hires, with the UK a target market.
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