LeanCon raises $6 million to reinvent construction planning with AI across New York

Manhattan, NY LeanCon, the AI startup transforming how construction projects are planned, today announced it has raised a total of $6 million, doubling its initial $3 million target. The company’s seed round was led by Ibex Investors, with participation from Fusion VC, Newman Architects, TCA LA, Connecticut Innovations, Siegel Capital, publicly traded construction firm,  and a distinguished group of angel investors experienced in construction, real estate, and technology, including Phil Bernstein, former VP of AEC at Autodesk and current deputy dean at the Yale School of Architecture.  

LeanCon is pioneering the world’s first AI-powered pre-construction engineering team - a platform that transforms the most complex phase of building into a data-driven science. On average, pre-construction teams working on project bids spend months evaluating, planning, and pricing hundreds of opportunities, yet only see about 8% of those projects come to fruition. LeanCon generates detailed construction projections that normally take months in approximately seven minutes, enabling teams to focus their time on the decisions that matter most, dramatically improving efficiency, win rates, opportunities pipeline, and reducing project planning costs from ~$2 million to almost $0.  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 perfectly 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 is already live across $650 million in development projects in New York, optimizing schedules, costs, logistics, and construction methods instantly with every change. 

LeanCon is currently working with one of the country’s largest privately held construction and real estate development firms in the industry. That relationship has evolved into a strategic partnership that underscores LeanCon’s growing establishment in the space. 

“Construction projects are simply too complex to plan optimally and, until now, the system wasn’t built for that complexity, especially given the growing challenges facing the industry,” 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.” 

Levi and Sapir Tubul, LeanCon’s co-founder and CTO, both grew up on construction sites with their fathers working in the trade, giving them early exposure to the industry’s frustrations. Before launching LeanCon, both worked as engineers on large-scale projects, where they experienced firsthand how small changes could derail entire workflows. Those experiences inspired LeanCon’s mission to evolve pre-construction planning into data-driven precision.

That hands-on understanding gave the founders credibility among industry veterans — even those who were initially skeptical. When Levi and Tubul first presented their idea to Phil Bernstein, one of the industry’s most well-known voices, his response was candid. 

“I told them the technology sounded impossible,” said Phil Bernstein. “But - nine months later, after LeanCon demonstrated a working MVP on a live Manhattan project, I was on board. I am pleased to be an advisor and investor as they work to solve real and pressing problems for the industry. That combination of deep construction knowledge and technical execution is exactly what makes LeanCon so compelling.” 

Aaron Rinberg, partner at Ibex Investors said: “The team at LeanCon are building more than software, they’re redefining the future of construction. 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 partnerships, LeanCon’s AI is beginning to influence broader economic impact. By automating and optimizing pre-construction, the platform helps reduce project costs, shorten schedules by up to 20%, and increase profitability for developers and contractors — freeing them to take on more projects and invest in workforce growth. The technology is also being explored for infrastructure and public-sector planning, where reducing overruns can deliver enormous taxpayer value.