$3.5m · Seed · AI · New York, US
Image: Cascade, via the official funding announcement.
Cascade, a New York-headquartered AI pursuit platform for architecture, engineering and construction firms, has raised $3.5m in Seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun. Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC also participated. Cascade said the capital would accelerate adoption and deepen the network of firms using its platform.
Finding work before the bid becomes obvious
AEC firms often discover opportunities through a mix of relationships, procurement portals and institutional memory. Cascade is trying to make that process systematic. Its funding announcement said the platform reads signals including bond filings, permits, capital plans, property transactions, earnings transcripts, budgets and meeting minutes, then connects those signals to where work may be forming and which firms are positioned to pursue it.
The product site describes a live government-project finder that scans public portals, scores RFPs against a firm's capabilities and supports proposal writing and specification analysis. It separately labels pre-bid intelligence and private-market signals as forthcoming features. That distinction matters: Cascade's immediate commercial product is already useful if it reduces the time teams spend monitoring portals and preparing unsuitable bids, while the broader predictive promise still depends on turning fragmented early signals into dependable opportunities.
Cascade said customers had surfaced more than $10bn in project opportunities through the platform. The company also cited Smallwood principal Tim Johannesson, who said Cascade helped the architecture firm respond to and win projects including a $6m job it found through the platform. These are company-provided claims, but they illustrate the payback logic: one additional contract can outweigh the cost of software used to find and qualify it.
A feedback loop tied to wins
Ada Ventures described Cascade's pricing as a subscription plus a success fee when a customer wins work. The investor also said the underlying data layer learns from pursuits, wins and losses. Commercially, that combines recurring software revenue with an outcome-linked component, while making customer feedback part of the product's improvement loop.
The financing is also intended to deepen Cascade's industry network. The company says more participating firms can create additional matching opportunities for partners, regional connections and joint bids. That could make the platform more useful as coverage expands, but the advantage depends on the quality of its project signals and on firms contributing enough outcome data to improve recommendations.
Co-founders Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira previously worked together at UnlikelyAI after roles at Google; Ferreira also worked in trading technology. Their stated ambition extends beyond project discovery into the full pursuit and delivery cycle. The Seed round gives Cascade capital to prove that early project intelligence can become a repeatable revenue tool rather than another database of leads.
