Shackleton AI Raises $5 Million Seed for Construction Agents

Shackleton AI has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures to deploy AI agents across construction administration. The New York company emerged from stealth with an agentic platform for development and construction management, according to its launch announcement.

Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, Silence VC, and other investors joined the round. Shackleton plans to spend the capital expanding the workflows its agents can manage and accelerating go-to-market efforts.

The numbers behind the launch are notable. The platform launched in June 2026 and now manages more than $1 billion in project value across more than 15 states. That figure counts construction projects run through the software, not Shackleton's revenue or valuation. Customers include midsize general contractors in multifamily, industrial, and commercial construction, plus multi-location brands such as Red Lobster, Dog Haus, and Pepper Lunch.

Why did the founders build it themselves first?

Co-founders Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin, and Olexandr Kaltsev did not start with software. They first built 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 project managers lose valuable time transferring information between bidding, scheduling, document, and financial tools.

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

What do the agents actually do?

Shackleton describes its product as an agentic operating system spanning site selection, preconstruction, project and field management, finance, communications, and project turnover. "Operating system" here means a shared business software platform coordinating construction work.

The agents handle concrete administrative tasks:

• Drafting requests for information, or RFIs, which record questions requiring clarification about project requirements
• Following up on overdue submittals, the documents covering proposed materials, equipment, or work
• Identifying budget variances before payment requests reach approval
• Converting field notes into daily reports

The company's website describes a common project model containing bids, budgets, RFIs, submittals, change orders, and field reports. The claimed advantage is context: an agent can work across related records instead of seeing only the data inside a single application. Shackleton offers role-specific agents for field work, planning, development, procurement, legal work, growth, and office and finance operations. These are product capabilities described by the company, not results from independent testing.

How does the platform reach the field?

The browser and field interfaces address different working conditions. Office users coordinate schedules, milestones, and critical paths. Field teams access drawings and capture updates on site. The company says sheets remain readable and annotatable offline, then reconcile when connectivity returns.

On the financial side, Shackleton's product overview combines project management, pipeline and proposals, bid management, field reporting, finance, and a communication hub. The hub lists Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations. The integration directory separately lists QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, and Sage Intacct. Depending on the connector, mapped records include projects, vendors or subcontractors, cost codes, commitments, invoices, bills, and budgets. This connects job activity to an existing accounting system rather than requiring every financial record to be recreated by hand.

Those connections matter for an agent handling a budget exception. A useful alert must relate a change in the project to the relevant cost record and approval workflow. Generating a plausible summary is only one part of completing the task.

How much autonomy do the agents get?

People stay in the loop. The launch announcement says agents operate across the platform while humans 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 sits beyond 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 independently established measures of the 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 test whether that record can expand its workflow coverage while keeping project decisions and financial approvals accountable to the teams responsible for delivery.