Shackleton AI raises $5M led by Battery Ventures to automate construction projects with AI agents

Shackleton AI, a New York-based construction technology startup, has emerged from stealth with $5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures, betting that AI agents can take over the administrative work slowing down construction projects. The company says its platform already manages more than $1 billion in construction project value across more than 15 U.S. states, giving the young startup an early foothold in an industry still heavily dependent on spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected software.

The funding comes just months after Shackleton launched its platform in June 2026. Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, and Silence VC participated in the round.

The company’s pitch is straightforward: construction teams should spend more time building and less time chasing paperwork.

For many contractors, managing a construction project means switching between multiple applications for bidding, scheduling, budgets, documents, and communication. According to Shackleton, some teams juggle seven to 10 separate systems, spending 10 to 15 hours each week on data entry and administrative tasks.

Shackleton wants to eliminate much of that manual work by centralizing project information and assigning repetitive tasks to AI agents.

Its platform covers the construction lifecycle, from site selection and bidding to project completion. The AI agents can draft requests for information (RFIs), follow up on overdue submittals, monitor budgets for unexpected changes, and turn field notes into daily reports.

The software is intended to do more than summarize documents or answer questions. Its agents can coordinate tasks across different parts of a project, with human review and approval built in.

Built by contractors who experienced the problem firsthand

Shackleton’s story begins inside a construction company, not a Silicon Valley software lab.

Co-founders Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin, and Olexandr Kaltsev previously built Ernest, a technology-focused commercial general contractor that grew to $35 million in annual revenue across the Southeastern United States.

Running that business exposed them to the problems they are now trying to solve.

“I was spending more time moving data between systems than running my jobs at Ernest,” said Michael Ragheb, co-founder and CEO of Shackleton AI. “Once we saw how much this was costing us, and how many other builders were dealing with the same problem, we knew we had to start from scratch and bring everything into one place. Every hour a project manager spends chasing status across disconnected tools is margin lost. When everything lives in one place, projects move faster, teams spend less time on administrative work and projects cost less. With Shackleton, multi-location customers have completed buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and as much as 18% under budget.”

Those performance figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.

Shackleton says its customers include general contractors working on multifamily, industrial, and commercial developments, alongside multi-location restaurant brands such as Red Lobster, Dog Haus, and Pepper Lunch.

Battery Ventures sees an opportunity to rethink how construction software works.

“Construction is one of the largest and least digitized sectors in the economy, and the teams running these projects are buried in manual work that software should have automated a decade ago,” said Michael Brown, general partner at Battery Ventures. “The Shackleton team built this platform to run their own business before bringing it to market. We believe their agentic approach is how construction projects will be managed going forward, and we are proud to lead this round.”

The new funding will support development of additional AI workflows and the company’s efforts to reach more customers.

Shackleton enters a market with established construction software providers and newer AI startups competing to reduce paperwork and improve project coordination. Its challenge will be proving that autonomous software can handle complicated construction workflows reliably, particularly where budgets, deadlines, and contractual obligations are involved.

The reported $1 billion in project value is an encouraging early adoption metric, but it represents construction activity managed through the platform, not Shackleton’s revenue.

That leaves an interesting question for the construction industry: Can AI agents move beyond assisting project managers to handling meaningful portions of their daily workload?

Shackleton is betting the answer is yes. Its founders have already experienced the cost of doing things the old way. Now they have $5 million to prove there is a better way.