Mercator AI raises $3.75M seed round for construction intelligence platform

Calgary-based construction tech startup Mercator AI has raised $3.75 million USD in seed funding to accelerate its growth.

The company, which is a real-time construction intelligence platform, said Freestyle Ventures and Builders VC co-led the financing, bringing Mercator AI’s total raised to $4.46 million USD since its inception in October 2020.

The newly-completed seed round also saw support from a consortium of other high-profile investors, including Standup Ventures and Zacua Ventures, with participation from The51, and Dustin DeVan (former CEO of Building Connected), alongside other notable angel investors.

Chloe Smith, CEO and co-founder of Mercator AI, said the funds will help the company accelerate its expansion into US and Canadian markets in 2023. The funding will also allow Mercator AI to grow its team, accelerating the development of its platform to refine its current early project detection offering.

“For us, this means acceleration of growth. We launched our platform in January 2022. We managed to raise our pre-seed by April of 2022 and then went straight into redeveloping the platform so it’s more locations and more customers,” said Smith. “We had grown basically from one market and one small platform to our lead generation tool today, our opportunity detection tool today, and seven markets.

“We’re across Canada and the US. We are in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Boston, L.A. and San Francisco. And what this funding will do for us is really help to accelerate not only the depth of intelligence and data that we’re able to bring into those markets and in surrounding markets, but it will also help us to broaden and expand across all major markets across Canada and the US. So it gives us a strong two-year runway for us to really, really develop and solidify our product suite.”

The company was started in October 2020 but the first product was launched in January 2022. Hogan Lee is the company’s COO and another co-founder.

“We’re building a real-time construction intelligence company,” Smith told Calgary Tech Journal. “We have basically four tools that we’ll be offering under that umbrella. The first tool that we have live today is an early opportunity detection platform for construction companies.”

Mercator AI targets general contractors, real estate firms and building product manufacturers and helps them start consulting on projects at a much earlier stage than a typical bidding stage.

“I come from a construction family,” Smith explained. “My family’s been in construction for 40 years and I took the data path. I came out of university and went straight into marketing and advertising for data. I always knew there was an opportunity to bring market intelligence and industry intelligence back to the construction industry but I didn’t quite know how. I had the opportunity throughout my career to work on the frontlines of innovation of this big data practice being built and being able to see how it would be applied across automotive through to health care and how we could use external data to help contextualize the data that we create inside our businesses.”

Smith thought there was a huge opportunity to bring this into construction.

“The magic in construction happens when we collaborate early on, get stakeholder input at the onset, and optimize for the best outcome together. That’s what we enable with Mercator AI,” Smith said.

With its raise complete, over the next 24 months, the company will accelerate the development of their early project detection tool to support pre-construction teams with macro industry insights, competitive intelligence, and client monitoring tools. The company also said it plans to broaden its solutions to business development, operations, and marketing professionals across construction, real estate, and manufacturing.