LeanCon, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup focused on construction planning, said Monday it raised a total of $6 million in seed funding, doubling its initial $3 million target.
The round was led by Ibex Investors, with participation from Fusion VC, Newman Architects, TCA LA, Connecticut Innovations, Siegel Capital and a group of angel investors from the construction, real estate and technology sectors. Among them is Phil Bernstein, former vice president of AEC at Autodesk and now deputy dean at the Yale School of Architecture.
LeanCon is developing what it calls the first AI-powered pre-construction engineering team, a platform designed to turn the most complex phase of building into a data-driven process. Pre-construction teams typically spend months evaluating, planning and pricing bids, yet only about 8% of projects move forward. LeanCon says its system can generate detailed projections in roughly seven minutes, helping reduce planning costs from about $2 million to nearly zero while improving efficiency and win rates.
The company says its technology draws on proprietary data and past project insights to create tailored plans for each client and surface alternatives that may not otherwise be identified. The platform is already in use across $650 million in development projects in New York, optimizing schedules, logistics, costs and construction methods in real time.
LeanCon is working with one of the United States’ largest privately held construction and real estate development firms, a relationship the company says has grown into a strategic partnership.
“Construction projects are simply too complex to plan optimally and, until now, the system wasn’t built for that complexity, especially given the growing challenges facing the industry,” LeanCon CEO and co-founder Ziv Levi said. “LeanCon has rebuilt construction planning with AI and will ultimately save project teams time and money while simultaneously winning more development bids.”
Levi and co-founder and CTO Sapir Tubul grew up around construction sites and later worked as engineers on large-scale projects, experience they say exposed them to the industry’s bottlenecks and inspired their platform.
Bernstein, who initially doubted the concept, said he was convinced after LeanCon demonstrated a working prototype. “I told them the technology sounded impossible,” he said. “But - nine months later, after LeanCon demonstrated a working MVP on a live Manhattan project, I was on board. I am pleased to be an advisor and investor as they work to solve real and pressing problems for the industry. That combination of deep construction knowledge and technical execution is exactly what makes LeanCon so compelling.”
Aaron Rinberg, partner at Ibex Investors, said: “The team at LeanCon are building more than software, they’re redefining the future of construction. By transforming pre-construction from a manual, drawn-out process into an intelligent, automated workflow, LeanCon is unlocking unprecedented efficiency and value creation in a very traditional industry.”
Investors say the technology could have broad economic impact. By automating and optimizing pre-construction, LeanCon aims to shorten schedules by up to 20%, reduce project costs and increase profitability for developers and contractors. The company says its tools are also being evaluated for infrastructure and public-sector planning, where minimizing overruns could yield significant savings.
LeanCon says its platform allows contractors and developers to plan as much as 100 times more projects annually with 90% accuracy and near-zero planning costs, spanning commercial, residential, infrastructure and academic construction.