Shackleton AI, a New York company that builds AI agents for construction and property development, has come out of stealth with a $5m seed round led by Battery Ventures. The company announced the round on 4 November 2026.
Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures and Silence VC also invested, along with others. Shackleton did not disclose a valuation.
The company launched its platform in June 2026.
“Every hour a project manager spends chasing status across disconnected tools is margin lost.”Michael Ragheb, co-founder and CEO, Shackleton AI
What Shackleton does
Shackleton's platform brings the stages of a building project into one system: development, preconstruction, project and field management, finance and communications. AI agents work across that shared data to handle administrative tasks, coordinate the project and flag risks.
Tech Startups reported that the agents can draft requests for information, chase overdue submittals, monitor budget changes and turn field notes into daily reports, with human review and approval built in. The company says some construction teams use seven to ten separate systems and spend 10 to 15 hours a week on data entry and admin.
RuntimeWire reported that construction firms lose project-manager hours to re-entering data across bidding, scheduling, document and finance tools. Tech Startups said the agents cover the whole project lifecycle, from site selection and bidding through to completion.
"Every hour a project manager spends chasing status across disconnected tools is margin lost," co-founder and chief executive Michael Ragheb said in the release.
Customers and results
Shackleton says its platform manages more than $1bn in project value across more than 15 US states. That figure is the value of projects on the platform, not the company's revenue. Customers include general contractors working on multifamily, industrial and commercial buildings, and restaurant chains Red Lobster, Dog Haus and Pepper Lunch.
The company says multi-location customers have finished buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and up to 18% under budget. Tech Startups noted that these figures are reported by the company and have not been independently checked.
"Construction is one of the largest and least digitized sectors in the economy," said Michael Brown, a general partner at Battery Ventures.
Built inside a contractor
Ragheb founded the company with Hassan Yasin and Olexandr Kaltsev. The three previously built Ernest, a technology-focused commercial general contractor in the south-eastern US, to $35m in annual revenue, and developed the Shackleton software inside that business. "I was spending more time moving data between systems than running my jobs at Ernest," Ragheb told Tech Startups.
Tech Startups placed Shackleton among established construction software vendors and newer AI start-ups competing for the same workflows. It said the main open question is whether autonomous software can handle budgets, deadlines and contract obligations reliably on real projects.
Shackleton will use the money to add more workflows that its agents can manage and to step up sales and marketing.
Company website: shackleton.ai