Shackleton AI, a provider of agentic technology for the construction industry, unveiled its platform that unifies development and construction management workflows and deploys AI agents to automate administrative project work. Launched in June 2026, the Shackleton platform currently manages over $1 billion in project value across more than 15 states for midsize general contractors in multifamily, industrial and commercial construction, as well as multi-location brands including Red Lobster, Dog Haus and Pepper Lunch.
The company also announced it raised $5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures, which it will use to expand the workflows its AI agents can manage and accelerate go-to-market efforts. Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, Silence VC and others also participated in the round.
“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.”
For many construction teams, critical project information is spread across separate systems for bidding, documents, scheduling and finances. It is not uncommon for a company to juggle seven to 10 systems and have its teams spend 10 to 15 hours a week on data entry and administrative work. Tariffs, higher interest rates and owners pushing for faster rollouts leave little room for that overhead, while legacy construction platforms were designed primarily as systems of record, leaving the follow-up to project teams.
For construction firms and developers, the Shackleton platform brings workflows – from site selection and bidding through project turnover – into a single system. AI agents handle many of the administrative tasks that consume project managers’ time, including drafting RFIs, following up on overdue submittals, flagging budget variances before payment requests are submitted for approval and converting field notes into daily reports.
Shackleton was built by founders who lived the problem. Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin and Olexandr Kaltsev grew Ernest, a tech-enabled commercial general contractor, to $35 million in revenue across the Southeastern United States, while facing numerous challenges with fragmented solutions.
“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. “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.”
Unlike point solutions that automate work within a single application, Shackleton’s AI agents operate across the entire platform, enabling teams to coordinate activities across projects and portfolios, while maintaining human oversight through review and approval workflows.
