Cascade Raises $3.5 Million to Predict Construction Projects Before Rivals

Cascade has raised $3.5 million to help construction firms spot public projects before they ever reach a bidding stage. Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator led the round for the London and New York startup, whose AI reads bond filings, permits and budget documents for early signs of work still months from becoming a formal request for proposals. Six additional venture firms joined the round.

The pitch lands hardest on whoever can afford to act on it first. Cascade says its software has already surfaced more than $10 billion in project opportunities tied to marquee jobs like JFK Airport and LaGuardia, months before any of that work went out to public bid.

A $3.5 Million Bet on Seeing Projects Before They Exist

The seed round closed with Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC joining Speedrun. A statement distributed on the wire laid out the thesis behind the check.

“Construction is one of the largest markets in the world, and the way firms find and win work has barely changed in decades,” said Marcus Segal, an investor with Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program, in the seven-investor syndicate’s funding announcement. “Cascade starts with a painful revenue problem. That is a powerful wedge into how construction work gets pursued, partnered on and delivered.”

Matt Penneycard of Ada Ventures framed the bet on the founders themselves: “Hannia and Joana combine deep AI capability with genuine respect for how this industry actually works, and customers can feel that.” Scott Johnson of Blitzscaling Ventures added that the startup “quickly grows their customer’s revenue, and the network effects and product led growth make it a high-potential Blitzscaler.”

How Cascade Reads a Project Before It Has a Name

The product itself is built around timing. Cascade’s platform, known internally as Pursuit Hub, scans public records long before a project reaches a plan room or a tender portal. The company says it tracks:

• Bond filings that reveal financing for public infrastructure before construction starts
• Permit applications filed with local and regional authorities
• Budget announcements and capital plans released by public agencies
• Property transactions that hint at a future development site
• Earnings call transcripts where executives preview capital spending
• Meeting minutes from planning boards and municipal committees

None of that paperwork is secret. It is scattered across thousands of separate filing systems, written in dense procedural language, and published on a schedule nobody but a specialist would think to check. Cascade’s bet is that the value was never in the documents. It was in reading all of them at once, continuously, before a human business-development team gets around to it.

Two Google Alumni Who Grew Up on Construction Sites

Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, the co-founders, both worked at Google before meeting at UnlikelyAI, the AI startup founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, the co-creator of Amazon Alexa. Zia now serves as chief executive. According to Tech Funding News, the pair also carried something more personal into the company: childhoods spent around family construction businesses, which shaped how they heard the industry’s complaint before they set out to fix it.

Construction executives kept telling them the same thing. Firms were not losing work because they lacked the skill to win it. They were losing it because they never knew it existed until a competitor had already locked in a relationship with the buyer.

Every firm we work with can point to a project they should have won but never even had a chance to see. Cascade is built around the bottom line: find the right work early, understand where you have a real advantage, and turn that into revenue delivered.

Zia said that in the company’s funding announcement, framing Cascade less as a data product than as a fix for a blind spot every firm in the industry already knew it had.

JFK, LaGuardia and a $10 Billion Head Start

Cascade’s early customer list includes firms working on JFK Airport, LaGuardia, data centers, nuclear facilities and luxury hotel developments, according to Tech Funding News. Across that client base, the company claims to have flagged more than $10 billion worth of projects before they were publicly announced.

The funding will go toward what the company describes as deepening its network and speeding up adoption of the platform. Cascade also plans to widen its relationship mapping, which currently surfaces contacts through Outlook, a starting point that reflects how email-driven construction business development still is.

The bigger the project, the earlier the signal tends to appear in the paper trail, which is exactly why Cascade’s biggest wins so far sit in aviation and heavy infrastructure. Those are also the projects with the largest bidding pools and the most to lose from showing up late.

The Incumbents Already Charge for Foresight

Cascade is not entering an empty market. Dodge Construction Network and ConstructConnect have sold project intelligence to contractors for decades, and neither publishes a flat price.

Dodge’s own site explains that its pricing is customized to data scope and geography, with no standard list because a single-market subcontractor and a national general contractor need very different coverage. ConstructConnect’s own site pitches tailored subscription plans for project leads rather than a posted rate card. Smaller public-bid aggregators exist at flat monthly rates in the double digits, but they tend to pick up projects only once a portal lists them, which is precisely the stage Cascade says it wants firms to beat.

Does Predicting Public Projects Favor the Biggest Bidders?

Yes, in practice, because the tools that read pre-bid signals are priced for firms that already win enough work to justify an enterprise subscription. A specialist tender-tracking guide, TenderRadar, has warned that AI procurement tools risk widening rather than narrowing the gap between large corporations and smaller suppliers if only well-resourced organizations can afford them.

That risk does not make the underlying documents secret or the practice improper. Bond filings and planning-board minutes are public record everywhere Cascade operates. What changes is who can afford to have a machine read all of them, every day, months ahead of a rival still waiting for the tender notice to land in an inbox.

What we know

• The round: $3.5 million led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun, with Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC also investing.
• The founders: Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, both former Google employees who met at UnlikelyAI.
• The claim: more than $10 billion in project opportunities surfaced for clients tied to JFK, LaGuardia, data centers and nuclear facilities.

What is still unconfirmed

• Valuation: Cascade has not disclosed what the $3.5 million round values the company at.
• Conversion rate: the company has not said what share of that $10 billion in flagged work its clients actually won.
• Pricing: unlike some smaller rivals with posted monthly rates, Cascade has not made its own subscription pricing public.

European venture money has been chasing this same seam of the construction industry all year. Backers recently funded goNEON’s push to bring its AI infrastructure planner to market, and a separate round went to Saible, which set out to fix the construction industry’s chronic late-payment problem. Cascade’s raise fits a pattern of investors treating the unglamorous back office of construction as fertile ground for AI, not an afterthought.

Speedrun’s Demo Day and the Road to the UK

Speedrun is Andreessen Horowitz’s roughly twelve-week accelerator, originally built around gaming startups before broadening into what its general manager has called a horizontal program open to any sector. Cascade’s seed round is a small check by the standards of an accelerator that has backed well over a hundred companies since 2023, but it buys the startup a case study line that a16z can point to well beyond gaming.

Forbes reports the founders intend to use the money to expand go-to-market work, hire more engineers, and push into new markets including the UK. For now, firms without a Cascade subscription still find out about the next contract the way they always have: when the crane shows up.