Shackleton AI Raises $5 Million Seed to Put AI Agents to Work Across Construction

Shackleton AI has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures as it emerges from stealth with an agentic platform for development and construction management. The New York company is targeting the administrative work that sits between a construction project’s plans, finances, field reports, and communications.

Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, Silence VC, and other investors participated. Shackleton plans to use the capital to expand the workflows its AI agents can manage and accelerate its go-to-market efforts.

According to the company’s launch announcement, the platform launched in June 2026 and now manages more than $1 billion in project value across more than 15 states. That figure describes construction projects managed through the software, rather than Shackleton’s revenue or valuation. Its customers include midsize general contractors working in multifamily, industrial, and commercial construction, alongside multi-location brands such as Red Lobster, Dog Haus, and Pepper Lunch.

Built Inside a General Contractor

Co-founders Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin, and Olexandr Kaltsev developed the platform after building Ernest, a technology-enabled commercial general contractor, to $35 million in revenue across the Southeastern United States. Their starting point was the difficulty of coordinating real projects across disconnected software.

“I was spending more time moving data between systems than running my jobs at Ernest,” said Ragheb, Shackleton’s co-founder and CEO, in the announcement. The company argues that project managers lose valuable time transferring information between bidding, scheduling, document, and financial tools.

Battery Ventures general partner Michael Brown pointed to that operating experience as part of the investment rationale. “The Shackleton team built this platform to run their own business before bringing it to market,” he said.

AI Agents Working Across Project Records

Shackleton describes its product as an agentic operating system spanning site selection, preconstruction, project and field management, finance, communications, and project turnover. Here, “operating system” refers to a shared business software platform coordinating construction work.

The agents’ tasks include drafting requests for information, or RFIs; following up on overdue submittals; identifying budget variances before payment requests reach approval; and converting field notes into daily reports. An RFI records a question requiring clarification about project requirements, while submittals commonly document materials, equipment, or other proposed work for review.

The company’s website describes a common project model containing bids, budgets, RFIs, submittals, change orders, and field reports. The intended advantage is context: an agent can work across related records instead of seeing only the information inside a single application. Shackleton presents role-specific agents for functions including field work, planning, development, procurement, legal work, growth, and office and finance operations.

Its browser and field interfaces also address different working conditions. Office users can coordinate schedules, milestones, and critical paths; field teams can access drawings and capture updates on site. The company says sheets remain readable and annotatable offline, then reconcile when connectivity returns. These are product capabilities described by Shackleton, rather than results from independent testing.

Connecting Project Activity to Accounting

Shackleton’s product overview combines project management, pipeline and proposals, bid management, field reporting, finance, and a communication hub. It describes side-by-side bid comparison and a subcontractor portal, with project communications linked to the relevant job. The communication hub lists Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations.

The company’s integration directory separately lists QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, and Sage Intacct. Depending on the connector, the mapped records include projects, vendors or subcontractors, cost codes, commitments, invoices, bills, and budgets. This gives the platform a way to connect job activity to an existing accounting system rather than requiring every financial record to be recreated by hand.

For an agent handling a budget exception, those connections are consequential. A useful alert needs to relate a change in the project to the relevant cost record and approval workflow. Generating a plausible summary is only one part of completing that administrative task.

Human Approval Remains Part of the Workflow

The launch announcement says agents operate across the platform while people retain oversight through review and approval workflows. Shackleton’s longer-term ambition is for construction projects to manage much of their own coordination, but that ambition should be distinguished from the administrative capabilities described at launch.

Ragheb says multi-location customers have completed buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and as much as 18% under budget. Those are company-reported outcomes, not a guarantee for every deployment or an independently established measure of the AI agents’ contribution.

The funding follows a broader push to bring AI into construction workflows, including platforms such as Trunk Tools and its construction-focused agents. Shackleton’s approach centers on consolidating the underlying project record and embedding assistance across it. The next stage will be expanding that workflow coverage while keeping project decisions and financial approvals accountable to the teams responsible for delivery.