1 Startup · $15M · AI for Construction Financials

What they're building

Agave started in late 2021 as a unified API for construction software — proprietary two-way integrations into 14+ ERP and project-management systems (Procore, Foundation, Deltek ComputerEase, and other decades-old, often on-prem tools built without modern APIs). That integration layer became the rails for a suite of AI products launched in late 2025: an AP invoice agent that fetches a supplier PDF, splits it into invoices, checks them against contracts, codes lines to cost codes, routes approvals, and writes validated data back to the ERP — plus expense management, vendor compliance, analytics, and a custom agent builder. The thesis: construction accounting is genuinely different (every project is its own profit center, costs tracked by job/phase/cost code, scope shifting via change orders), so generic AI tools fail, and whoever owns the system-of-record connections owns the workflow. AI-product recurring revenue is up more than 10x since launch, per the company.

Why this matters

Construction is a ~$12T industry running on 20–40-year-old software, and the people who hold its financial know-how are leaving: NCCER projects 41% of the construction workforce retires by 2031, with only about one in ten workers under 25. Agave's answer is to encode that institutional knowledge into automated workflows before it walks out the door. The traction is unusual for this stage: profitable for over two years, revenue roughly tripling year over year, 500+ contractors from $5M to $5B+ in annual revenue, used across 80,000+ projects representing $100B+ in volume — including work on the Tesla Gigafactory, AWS and Meta data centers, and Austin's light rail, per the company. Accel led the Seed and came back to lead the A. The founding trio has worked together for nearly a decade, since Graphiq (acquired by Amazon in 2017).