Hannia Zia

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Hannia Zia is co-founder and chief executive of Cascade, a company applying AI to the way construction firms find and win work. Her interest in the sector is inherited rather than incidental: her father ran a construction business that eventually failed, undone in large part by the difficulty of navigating procurement.

Zia worked at Google before joining UnlikelyAI, the neuro-symbolic AI company founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, one of the architects of Amazon Alexa. As VP of Product she met Joana Ferreira, who led the AI platform there and its work on knowledge graphs and LLM agents. The two left to test a thesis borrowed from quantitative finance: that the appetite for messy public data used to anticipate market movements could be pointed at the built environment instead.

Cascade launched in 2025 and now works with around 20 architecture, engineering and construction clients, including firms engaged on JFK and LaGuardia airports, data centres and modular nuclear projects. In July 2026 it raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, with Zia running the company from London and New York.