Cascade raises $3.5M to help construction firms win bids

Cascade, launched in 2025, is building a platform that helps architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms track and win project bids. Co-founders Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira built the company after watching family members struggle to find steady work in the industry — Ferreira’s mother sold materials to construction companies and her uncle built mansions in the Middle East, while Zia’s father tried and failed to sustain a construction business in his native Pakistan. “They’re incredible at their craft but just don’t have access to the right tools to get more work,” Ferreira told TechCrunch.

Zia compares the current process of finding construction projects to a nonstop hunt across scattered portals: firms must log into separate systems run by individual U.S. states, cities, districts, counties, and federal agencies to find opportunities, then figure out which ones they might actually win. Cascade’s platform is meant to consolidate that search. Companies sign up, and Cascade uses AI tools to flag which projects they have the best shot at winning, drawing on signals and data across U.S. state, local, private-contract, and federal-agency sources, plus historical tender outcomes to predict which developers are likely to land upcoming deals. A firm that specializes in something as specific as building suspension bridges, Zia said, still has to comb through every one of these disparate portals to find where such opportunities are posted. If a state announces a $100 million affordable housing grant, for instance, Cascade checks which developers won that same grant the last time it was offered and surfaces the likeliest winners to its customers.

The founders applied to Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator last September; the pressure of preparing for demo day, they said, helped Cascade land contracts with firms that have built JFK and La Guardia airports, Four Seasons hotels, and data center projects. Zia said the accelerator gave Cascade visibility and validation that helped it close larger deals. Cascade will use the new seed funding to expand its go-to-market efforts, host industry events, and hire more engineers.

Cascade competes with established players like GovWin IQ and ConstructConnect, though Ferreira argues her company is more AI-native: every time a customer wins a bid, the feedback sharpens Cascade’s model, building toward what she describes as a complete, AI-traversable map of the construction industry’s leads and opportunities.

Why it matters

The round underscores investor appetite for AI tools aimed at fragmented, offline-heavy industries like construction, where matching supply (contractors) to scattered public and private demand has historically been a manual, relationship-driven slog.