Thayer Investment Partners is thrilled to participate in Shackleton AI’s $5 million seed round, led by Battery Ventures. Brick & Mortar Ventures, Trust Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Motivate Partners, Act One Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, Silence VC, and others also joined the round, which arrives as Shackleton emerges from stealth. The company will use the funding to expand the workflows its AI agents can manage and to accelerate go-to-market efforts.

Shackleton’s platform, launched in June 2026, brings development and construction management into a single system, from site selection and bidding through project turnover. Its AI agents take on the administrative work that eats up project managers’ time, such as drafting RFIs, following up on overdue submittals, flagging budget variances before payment requests go out, and turning field notes into daily reports, with human review and approval built in. The company reports that the platform manages more than $1 billion in project value across more than 15 states, serving midsize general contractors and multi-location brands including Red Lobster, Dog Haus, and Pepper Lunch.

“I was spending more time moving data between systems than running my jobs at Ernest. Once we saw how much this was costing us, and how many other builders were dealing with the same problem, we knew we had to start from scratch and bring everything into one place.”

— Michael Ragheb, Co-Founder & CEO, Shackleton AI

Ragheb, Hassan Yasin, and Olexandr Kaltsev built Shackleton after growing Ernest, a tech-enabled commercial general contractor, to $35 million in revenue across the Southeastern United States. The company says teams commonly juggle seven to 10 systems and spend 10 to 15 hours a week on data entry and administrative work, and it reports that multi-location customers have completed buildouts up to 35% ahead of schedule and as much as 18% under budget. Michael Brown, general partner at Battery Ventures, called construction “one of the largest and least digitized sectors in the economy.”

We believe the strongest vertical AI companies are built by operators who have lived the problem, and Shackleton’s founders ran the very workflows they now automate. Unlike point solutions that automate a task inside one application, Shackleton’s agents work across the whole platform, coordinating activity across projects and portfolios. As hospitality brands and other multi-location operators keep building and renovating, we believe the teams delivering those projects deserve software that works as hard as they do.

We’re proud to support Michael Ragheb, Hassan Yasin, Olexandr Kaltsev, and the entire Shackleton team as they bring agentic AI to the job site. Read the entire announcement at PR Newswire.