Shackleton AI Raises $5M Seed to Expand Construction Agent Workflows

Shackleton AI announced on November 4, 2026 that it had emerged from stealth and raised $5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures. The capital will expand the workflows its construction AI agents can manage and accelerate go-to-market efforts.

The round also included Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures and Silence VC, among others. The platform itself launched in June 2026.

Shackleton reports that the platform manages more than $1 billion in project value across more than 15 states. It serves midsize general contractors in multifamily, industrial and commercial construction, as well as multi-location brands including Red Lobster, Dog Haus and Pepper Lunch.

Built Inside a General Contractor

Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin and Olexandr Kaltsev founded Shackleton in 2026 after growing Ernest, a technology-enabled commercial general contractor, to $35 million in annual revenue across the Southeastern United States. Ragheb is Shackleton’s chief executive. Their starting point was the fragmented software and manual follow-up they encountered while running that business.

Shackleton describes companies juggling seven to 10 systems for bidding, documents, scheduling and finances, with teams spending 10 to 15 hours a week on data entry and administrative work. The platform consolidates those records and automates follow-up work that conventional systems of record leave to project teams.

Agents Share One Project Record

The platform spans development, preconstruction, project and field management, finance and communications, covering work from site selection and bidding through turnover. Its agents draft requests for information (RFIs), follow up on overdue submittals, flag budget variances before payment requests are submitted for approval and convert field notes into daily reports.

The agents operate across shared data to coordinate activities across projects and portfolios. Review and approval workflows maintain human oversight over their work.

The official product description places projects, bids, budgets, RFIs, submittals, change orders and field reports in one model. Specialized agents cover field operations, growth, planning, development, procurement, legal, and office and finance work.

Browser tools include Gantt charts, milestones, look-aheads and critical-path scheduling. Field staff can mark up plans and capture walkthroughs, while offline access keeps drawing sheets readable and annotatable without a signal before synchronizing when the crew is back in range. These features connect schedule updates and jobsite records to the same project model used by the agents, addressing the transfer of information between disconnected field and office tools.

Reported Results and a Broader Ambition

Ragheb said multi-location customers have completed buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and as much as 18% under budget. Both figures are upper-bound outcomes rather than averages across the platform’s projects.

Andi Cramer, Red Lobster’s senior director of construction and rebuild, said consolidating communication and project tracking on Shackleton kept the restaurant company’s rebrand rollout on schedule.

Battery Ventures general partner Michael Brown said the firm believes Shackleton’s agentic approach is how construction projects will be managed going forward. His comments present broader agent-based management as the investment thesis behind the round.

Shackleton says it is building toward construction projects that can largely manage themselves, extending proactive, always-on assistance across project delivery.

The funding therefore targets the space between the current product and that ambition: more agent-managed administrative work inside one project record, with review and approval still defining the boundary of human control.