Building Permit Aggregator Startup Shovels Raises $5M Seed Round

Shovels, an AI-powered building insights and analytics platform, announced Tuesday that it closed a $5 million seed round to grow its building permit data extraction technology for the construction industry.

San Francisco-based venture capital fund Base10 Partners led the round. To date, Shovels has raised $6.5 million in total funding.

Founded in 2022, Lafayette, Calif.-based Shovels uses its proprietary technology to extract data and predictive insights from a highly fragmented building permit dataset across more than 20,000 jurisdictions nationwide, said Ryan Buckley, co-founder and CEO of Shovels.

“We can now build an AI-native scraping infrastructure fine-tuned for local government data,” said Buckley, who credited his co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Luka Kacil with helping build the startup. “And we can use this information in myriad ways across multiple sectors — not just what we’re doing now, which is basically lead generation for companies who sell products and services to contractors. We can expand into tooling that will allow builders to manage a portfolio of building permits.”

Extracting data and insight from building permits is important for the construction industry because of the rich metadata contained in the documents, said Buckley. For example, the permits can offer insights into what home or business owners are doing that in turn provide vendors with actionable information.

“If you’re putting on a new roof, that’s actually a really good time to put on solar panels,” Buckley explained. “So the solar industry is very interested in people with active roofing permits, because that’s when they’re going to be able to convince someone to put on solar panels.”

Additionally, home improvement companies that want to directly target homeowners who are remodeling will find such data valuable.

“If you’re doing a kitchen remodel or a big addition, you’re going to be in the market for plumbing and lighting fixtures, or for painting, or new kitchen appliances,” he said. “A big enough project, and maybe now you’re into couches, window coverings, and then also landscaping, because on a job like that your front yard is going to be completely chewed up.”

Shovels also plans to expand into a data analytics tool for government economic development managers, directors and elected officials like mayors who want to view building  trends, Buckley added.

“We can really start thinking hard about building permit reform or just permit reform in general,” he said. “How can we make our cities and counties more attractive to building housing and commercial real estate, and what that does to local economies and to the financial industry. This is about being able to see nationwide trends at a very, very granular level. You’re not just looking at state or county statistics, but address by address, neighborhood by neighborhood, census tract by census tract.”

Such information is not available at a granular level today, Buckley said. 

“Shovels has a rare and massive opportunity to become the definitive source of truth for high-value, hard-to-access datasets at the local government level — starting with permitting and expanding beyond,” Rexhi Dollaku, general partner at Base10 Partners, said in a statement.

In the future, Shovels intends to incorporate additional governmental and regulatory datasets, broadening the scope of actionable intelligence available to customers. The company recently released its inaugural Quarterly Permit Index, a report that aims to showcase the state of construction and how people are feeling about the economy. For example, the first quarter 2025 report found that 134,000 new construction permits were issued nationally, down 7.2 percent from fourth quarter 2024’s 145,000 permits.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.