Cascade, a startup building a platform to help architecture, engineering, and construction companies find and win projects, has raised $3.5 million in a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, Ada Ventures, and Snowball VC.
Founded in 2025, Cascade was born when its founders, Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, saw first-hand the challenges facing the construction industry in securing work on time.
“My mother worked for a company that sold materials to construction companies, and my uncle built mansions in the Middle East. They were great at what they did, but they didn't have access to the right tools to get more work done,” Ferreira told TechCrunch. Zia then recalled when her father tried to start a construction business in his native Pakistan: “He couldn't get enough projects to sustain himself.”
Zia described the current process of finding construction projects as a “constant treasure hunt,” requiring companies to log into portals for each state, city, district, county and federal agency in the United States. “So if you're really good at building suspension bridges, you've got to find all of those opportunities across these different portals.”
Cascade aims to help architecture, construction, and engineering companies on this front by tracking ongoing and upcoming projects and using previous bid data to predict which developers are likely to win a deal.
Here's how the platform works: When companies sign up to the platform, Cascade uses AI tools to determine which projects have the best chance of winning. It also uses a variety of signals and data points across U.S. states, local governments, private contracts, and federal agencies to predict what projects will launch. For example, if a state announces a $100 million affordable housing grant, Cascade will monitor which developers won the grant the last time it was announced.
“We connect that data and tell our customers, 'Maybe one of these five developers will win this newly announced grant, so start talking to them to win the project,'” Ferreira explained.
The two applied for the A16Z speed run last September. They said the pressure to do well at Demo Day and being around the “excellence” of other founders helped them land deals with the companies that built JFK and LaGuardia airports, Four Seasons hotels and some data centers. “Speedrun gave us the visibility and seal of approval to close big deals,” says Zia.
Startups will use the fresh cash to go to market, host industry events, and hire more engineers.
Other startups in this space include GovWin IQ and ConstructConnect, but Ferreira claims Cascade is more AI-native than those platforms.
“As customers give us feedback with each winning bid, the system gets smarter and smarter. Over time, we will have a complete map of the industry that our AI can traverse and predict the best projects and leads for each customer,” she said.
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