NEW YORK – November 04, 2026 -- Shackleton AI raised $5 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures as it emerged from stealth with an agentic operating system for construction that already manages more than $1 billion in project value across more than 15 U.S. states.
The platform launched in June 2026. Its customers include midsize general contractors in multifamily, industrial and commercial construction, as well as multi-location brands Red Lobster, Dog Haus and Pepper Lunch. Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Thayer Investment Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures and Silence VC also joined the round. Shackleton will use the capital to expand the workflows its AI agents can manage and to accelerate go-to-market efforts.
Shackleton targets fragmented systems that consume 10 to 15 weekly hours per team
According to the company, construction firms often juggle seven to 10 separate systems for bidding, documents, scheduling and finances. Teams can spend 10 to 15 hours a week on data entry and administrative work. Shackleton argues that tariffs, higher interest rates and owners' demands for faster rollouts leave little room for that overhead, and that legacy construction platforms were designed mainly as systems of record, leaving follow-up to project teams.
Founders who scaled a $35 million contractor built the platform
Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin and Olexandr Kaltsev previously grew Ernest, a tech-enabled commercial general contractor, to $35 million in revenue across the Southeastern United States. Ragheb, now Shackleton's CEO, said multi-location customers have completed buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and as much as 18% under budget. Those figures are company-reported.
AI agents draft RFIs, chase submittals and flag budget variances
The platform covers workflows from site selection and bidding through project turnover. Its agents draft RFIs, follow up on overdue submittals, flag budget variances before payment requests go to approval and convert field notes into daily reports. Unlike point solutions that automate work inside a single application, the agents operate across the whole platform and coordinate activity across projects and portfolios. Review and approval workflows keep humans in oversight.
Battery Ventures general partner Michael Brown said the team built the platform to run its own business before taking it to market. Andi Cramer, senior director of construction and rebuild at Red Lobster, said consolidating communication and project tracking on Shackleton has kept the brand's rebrand rollout on schedule across its locations.