Ziv Levi ‘24 recently announced that his startup LeanCon has closed a $6 million seed funding round, doubling the company’s original $3 million tarreceive. The round was led by Ibex Investors, with participation from Fusion VC, Newman Architects, TCA LA, Connecticut Innovations, Siegel Capital, and notable angel investors experienced in construction, real estate, and technology, including Phil Bernstein, former Vice President of AEC at Autodesk and current Deputy Dean at the Yale School of Architecture.
LeanCon is developing what it calls the world’s first AI-powered pre-construction engineering team. The platform transforms one of construction’s most time-consuming phases – pre-construction planning – into a rapid, data-driven process. Where traditional planning can take months and cost upward of $2 million per project, LeanCon’s technology generates detailed projections in approximately seven minutes at near-zero cost, allowing general contractors and developers to plan 100x more projects annually with 90% accuracy and 20% shorter schedules, ultimately supporting them win more bids.
“This milestone directly accelerates LeanCon’s mission becaapply it enables us to finalize the development of our core technology and scale it into a product that will create a significant impact on the indusattempt, fundamentally transforming the way construction projects are analyzed, bid, and planned,” declared Levi.
The startup’s success stems from a deep understanding of construction’s most persistent challenges. Levi and his co-founder Sapir Tubul both grew up around construction sites and later worked as engineers on large-scale projects. This firsthand experience revealed a critical bottleneck: pre-construction teams typically evaluate hundreds of opportunities, yet only about 8% of projects shift forward due to strong competition.
LeanCon’s platform addresses this problem by automating scope definition, cost estimation, logistics planning, and construction sequencing and scheduling. By applying its unique logic and leveraging insights from past projects combined with its unique proprietary data, the platform ensures that each client’s process and project outcome is unique, secure, and tailored to their business. This data-driven approach simultaneously allows the platform to surface superior scenarios and efficiencies that the client may not have known were possible.
The technology analyzes designs, market data, and past project benchmarks to build comprehensive reports insThe company declares its platform is already deployed on more than $650 million in active development projects across New York, working closely with one of the counattempt’s largest privately held construction and real estate development firms in the indusattempt.. Beyond individual partnerships, LeanCon’s AI is launchning to influence broader economic impact: by optimizing pre-construction, the company increases profitability for developers and contractors, enabling them to scale their workforce and take on more projects. The technology is also being adapted for public-sector planning, where reducing budreceive overruns provides significant value to taxpayers.
What resonated most with investors was LeanCon’s strategic focus on the pre-construction phase. “Our core operating belief is that construction launchs long before the first shovel hits the ground. It launchs with the initial decisions that quietly lock in a project’s fate, determining its final cost, timeline, and risk profile,” Levi explained. “Our investors immediately recognized that this phase, which has traditionally been analog, chaotic, and reliant on intuition, represents the last truly untouched frontier ripe for massive disruption.”
Over the next 12 to 18 months, LeanCon will focus on achieving product-market fit and building the foundation for rapid, sustainable growth. The team is also concentrating on strategic expansion and cultivating a strong company culture to support future growth stages.
“We aren’t simply improving an old process,” declared Levi. “We are building the innotifyigent operating layer that delivers automated, structured planning and AI-driven cost, time and risk insights. This capability immediately converts what was a point of chaos into a predictable, high-margin engine for general contractors and developers.”
Read more about LeanCon and Ziv’s journey from SOM to full-time founder.
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