NEW HAVEN, CT— LeanCon, the AI startup reshaping how construction projects are planned and priced, announced it has closed a $6 million seed round—doubling its initial $3 million fundraising target and signaling rising demand for AI solutions in the built environment.
The round was led by Ibex Investors, with participation from Fusion VC, Newman Architects, TCA LA, Connecticut Innovations, Siegel Capital, a publicly traded construction firm, and a select group of high-profile angel investors with deep experience in construction, real estate, and technology. Among them is Phil Bernstein, former VP of AEC at Autodesk and current Deputy Dean at the Yale School of Architecture.
The funding milestone comes as LeanCon’s platform is already being used on more than $650 million in active development projects across New York—validating what many in the industry long believed impossible: transforming pre-construction planning into a fast, automated, data-driven discipline.
LeanCon is building the world’s first AI-powered pre-construction engineering team, a platform designed to eliminate the guesswork, manual effort, and months-long timelines that typically slow down early project planning.
Pre-construction teams routinely evaluate hundreds of bid opportunities each year but convert only around 8% into actual projects. LeanCon compresses the most time-consuming part of the process—developing schedules, logistics, sequencing, and cost projections—from months to approximately seven minutes.
According to internal testing and client deployments, the platform can reduce early planning costs from ~$2 million to nearly $0 while increasing win rates and pipeline visibility.
By leveraging proprietary datasets and logic built from real project histories, LeanCon produces outputs tailored to each client’s specific workflows and priorities. The platform dynamically updates schedules, costs, and construction methods in real time as design changes are made.
LeanCon is currently partnering with one of the nation’s largest privately held construction and real estate development companies—now a strategic collaborator. The partnership reflects a broader market shift as major firms seek AI-driven efficiency to counter rising construction costs, labor shortages, and project complexity.
“Construction projects are simply too complex to plan optimally and, until now, the system wasn’t built for that complexity,” said Ziv Levi, CEO and Co-Founder of LeanCon. “LeanCon has rebuilt construction planning with AI and will ultimately save project teams time and money while simultaneously winning more development bids.”
The founding team’s credibility stems from firsthand industry experience. Levi and Co-Founder/CTO Sapir Tubul grew up on construction sites, later becoming engineers on major developments. Seeing how minor changes could derail entire workflows pushed them to rethink pre-construction from the ground up.
Even seasoned experts were originally skeptical—including Phil Bernstein, who has spent decades shaping the intersection of architecture, construction, and digital innovation.
“I told them the technology sounded impossible,” Bernstein said. “But nine months later, after LeanCon demonstrated a working MVP on a live Manhattan project, I was on board. That combination of deep construction knowledge and technical execution is exactly what makes LeanCon so compelling.”
“The team at LeanCon are building more than software—they’re redefining the future of construction,” said Aaron Rinberg, Partner at Ibex Investors. “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.”
Beyond individual projects, LeanCon’s technology is poised to influence the industry at scale. Early data suggests LeanCon can help:
- Reduce project costs
- Shorten schedules by up to 20%
- Increase profitability for developers and contractors
- Expand capacity for firms to take on more work
- Strengthen workforce investment through more predictable pipelines
LeanCon’s AI is also being evaluated for use in infrastructure and public-sector planning, where reducing overruns and improving accuracy can save significant taxpayer dollars.
The company plans to scale engineering, deepen its dataset, and expand across the U.S. in 2026—solidifying its mission to turn pre-construction planning into a precise, automated science rather than a costly guessing game.
