Agave Raises $15M Series A to Bring AI to Construction Financials

Backed by Accel, Agave streamlines financial workflows on top of contractors’ existing systems, during critical moment as 41% of industry workforce retires in the next five years

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Agave, the AI platform for construction financials, today announced it raised a $15M Series A funding round from Accel, who led Agave’s Seed round, with continued participation from YCombinator. The round brings Agave's total funding to over $20 million since its origin in late 2021. Founded by Tom Reno, John Zucchi, and Pooria Azimi, Agave will use the new capital to expand its team and scale its growing suite of products, which already help hundreds of contractors boost their team’s productivity by automating accounting and back-office work.

This raise comes on the heels of exceptional growth for Agave. The company has been profitable for over two years, tripled its revenue year-over-year, and works with more than 500 general and specialty contractors from $5 million to more than $5 billion in annual revenue. Its customers span commercial, civil, and residential construction and trades including electrical, roofing, and concrete, like Evans General Contractors, Stacy Witbeck, Brinkman Construction, Satterfield & Pontikes, and RW Dake. Today, Agave is used across more than 80,000 construction projects in the U.S. and Canada, representing more than $100 billion in project volume. Agave customers report saving more than 60 hours per month on tasks like data entry, financial reporting and cost reconciliation across systems.

Controlling finances is critical to maintaining profit margins on construction projects, which typically span years, require unexpected changes mid-project, and involve dozens of otherwise unrelated companies. The accounting behind it differs significantly from standard business rules. Every project runs as its own profit center, costs are tracked by job, phase, and cost code, and scope shifts mid-build through change orders. Generic accounting systems and AI tools do not support these nuances, and the systems that do are decades old, on-prem or hosted on remote servers, and built without modern APIs.

“AI adoption in construction won't come from replacing existing systems, but from enabling AI to work seamlessly with them," said Tom Reno, cofounder and CEO of Agave. "Agave helps contractors unlock the value of AI on top of the tools that already run their business, turning siloed data and manual processes into streamlined workflows that allow contractors to take on more jobs at higher margins, without painful system migrations or training an army of new employees."

Agave spent four years forging partnerships with the major construction platforms and building proprietary, two-way connections with more than 14 ERP and project management systems. These two-way connections enable Agave to access data and automate complete workflows end to end, where other tools with simpler connections can manage only isolated pieces.

Agave's products reflect this focus on integration and augmentation over replacement. They give construction field teams real-time financial data from ERPs inside project management systems like Procore and Autodesk Forma Build, and automatically code, reconcile, and import invoices and credit-card transactions to ERPs. Agave helps onboard new vendors by comparing long insurance documents against predefined requirements before approving them to do work and receive payments. Users can also build their own AI agents, automating business-specific workflows that pre-built tools can’t support. Customers report over 80% reduction in time spent across thousands of tasks per month.

Agave helps the industry confront a looming challenge: 41% of the construction workforce will retire in the next five years, and only 10% of the entire workforce is under 25 years old. The experienced staff who manage current processes are exiting faster than younger workers are entering. Agave’s solutions are becoming increasingly essential to the future of construction, helping companies codify institutional knowledge, automate work, and augment teams with tools that boost their productivity.

"Most energy in AI goes into building new software. The bigger opportunity is deploying AI to operate on systems companies already depend on, helping enterprises get more out of what they have today," said Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel. "Agave does this for construction, going straight at the messy, domain-specific problems most teams avoid. It's a rare combination of experienced team and market need, and they're the ones to capitalize on the opportunity."

"We've more than doubled in size over the past few years, and Agave's been a big reason my team can keep up without adding headcount," said Ken Pattridge, CFO of RW Dake Construction. "Agave keeps our Project Management and ERP data in sync automatically, so the numbers from the field, like change orders, show up in our accounting system without anyone rekeying them. And the AI does in minutes what would otherwise take us days. I've had it turn a master job report into tailored financials for each of our 47 PMs, and with a few more prompts, scan months of activity across hundreds of credit cards to catch expenses coded incorrectly that we should've billed to clients. That kind of analysis used to take days of manual work to pull together, so it often never got done. I don't know how we'd keep up without Agave now."

About Agave

Agave is the AI platform for construction financials, built to work seamlessly with the systems contractors already use. It serves general and specialty contractors, connecting more than 14 ERP and project management systems across cloud, hosted, and on-prem environments. Agave's products include cross-system data integration and AI tools for AP invoice automation, expenses management, vendor compliance, analytics and agent building. Profitable and backed by Accel and YCombinator, Agave is used by more than 500 contractors across North America today.