In construction, the most expensive projects may be the ones a firm never even knew about.

Somewhere a bond has been filed, a site has changed hands and the winner of a nine-figure project is already being decided, months before anyone knows about it.

US-based Cascade, the AI pursuit platform for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms, believes it can bring all of these processes into the open.

“Every firm we work with can point to a project they should have won, but never even had a chance to see,” says Cascade CEO and co-founder Hannia Zia.

“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.”

According to Cascade, every multimillion-dollar project leaves traces, long before the request for proposal is issued.

This can be in the form a bond filing or a property changing hands to a developer, for example.

Cascade is designed to detect these events continuously across bond filings, permits, capital plans, property transactions, earnings transcripts, budget announcements and meeting minutes, and connecting them to what they signal – where work is forming, what kind and which firms are positioned to win the contract.

In short: Cascade anticipates projects as they form, scores each one for fit so firms can pursue the work they are most likely to win, and then also seeks ways in through relationships already sitting in Outlook and other software.

Within only a few months, Cascade has signed AEC customers whose work spans projects at major US airports, data centres and nuclear reactors.

The company has also just announced that it has raised $3.5-million from Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures and Snowball VC.

“A project broke ground a few blocks away from me. I’ve been in the industry for 30 years, I didn’t even know it was out on bid,” says Smallwood principal Tim Johannesson.

Smallwood is the luxury architecture firm behind projects for the Four Seasons, the Ritz, Hyatt and many other hotels.

“Cascade has helped us respond to and win more projects, including a recent $6-million project, that I was only able to find through Cascade.”

Cascade was founded by Zia and Joana Ferreira, two former Google operators who met at UnlikelyAI, the startup founded by the inventor of Amazon Alexa.

There, Zia served as product VP and Ferreira led the AI platform.

“Hedge funds look at a crazy amount of data to predict stock movements,” says Ferreira.

“We use the same logic to predict construction projects.”

Cascade says its newest round of funding will accelerate adoption and deepen Cascade’s network across the industry.

“In a $900-billion global industry, finding and winning the right projects has remained a manual, relationship-driven challenge for decades,” says Índico Capital Partners managing general partner Stephan de Moraes.

“Cascade is completely rewriting that playbook. Hannia and Joana have taken world-class AI capability and built a predictive engine that solves a massive revenue problem for the construction sector before a bid even exists.”