Cascade Raises 3.5 Million Dollars as AI Construction Predictor Wins Andreessen Horowitz Backing

A New York based startup that predicts which construction projects are about to hit the market has closed a fresh funding round backed by one of Silicon Valley's most active early stage investors.

Cascade, an AI platform built for architecture, engineering and construction firms, announced on Tuesday that it raised 3.5 million dollars in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun. Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC also joined the round.

The company positions itself as a pursuit platform for the AEC industry, using artificial intelligence to flag construction bonds, permits and site transactions months before a request for proposal is ever published. According to the company, its platform has already surfaced more than 10 billion dollars worth of potential projects for clients that have worked on sites including JFK Airport, LaGuardia Airport, Moynihan Train Hall and the Cuomo Bridge, along with luxury hotel brands and data center and nuclear facility developers.

Cascade was founded by Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, who previously worked together at another AI startup before launching the company. Zia helped scale Google Pay in India from zero to 100 million users, holds a patent for a payment authentication design, and built AI systems for the Pakistani government during its COVID response, work that earned her an award from the country's prime minister and a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Ferreira built machine learning systems for Google Search and for one of the United Kingdom's largest trading apps.

Both founders trace their interest in construction technology back to their upbringing. Ferreira grew up in a Portuguese town built around construction and carpentry work, while Zia watched her father's construction business struggle for years because of how difficult it was to navigate procurement. That personal history shaped the pitch behind Cascade, which the founders describe as an attempt to fix an industry that decides how the most expensive projects in the world get built and financed, often through relationships and paperwork rather than visibility into what is actually available to bid on.

"Every firm we work with can point to a project they should have won but never even had a chance to see," said Hannia Zia, co‑founder and chief executive of Cascade, in a statement announcing the round.

The platform works by matching AEC firms not only to projects but to each other, connecting potential bidding partners, regional collaborators and teaming opportunities across the United States. Cascade says the network effect strengthens as more firms join, since additional data from new members improves the accuracy of predictions for the rest of the platform.

Syed Irfan Raza, chief financial officer at Munoz Engineering, a firm that has worked on LaGuardia Airport, Moynihan Train Hall and the Cuomo Bridge, said in a statement that Cascade helps the company plan strategically in the competitive New York construction market and understands how the industry runs on relationships and trust.

Marcus Segal, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, said construction remains one of the largest markets in the world despite the way firms find and win work having barely changed in decades, a gap he pointed to as the opportunity behind Cascade's pitch.

The new funding will go toward accelerating adoption of the platform and deepening Cascade's network across the AEC industry. The company noted that even building a single house typically requires around twenty companies working together, and multimillion dollar commercial projects can involve an order of magnitude more, which is part of why matching the right firms to the right opportunities early has become a bottleneck the company is betting it can solve with artificial intelligence.

Cascade's raise comes as Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun continues to expand its footprint in applied AI. The accelerator, which started three years ago as a gaming focused program backed by 75 million dollars, has since evolved into a broader early stage vehicle that has deployed more than 200 million dollars across over 250 startups since 2023, investing up to 1 million dollars per company at the pre‑seed and seed stage in exchange for equity, alongside credits and support through a twelve week program culminating in a demo day in San Francisco.

The funding announcement was made from New York City on July 21, 2026.