tl;dr: Fresh off a $15M Series A led by Accel (total funding now $20M+), Agave is experiencing hockey-stick growth. We're looking for a world-class full-stack/backend engineer. Learn more about us here (link).
We're building the financial operations platform for construction, a $12T global industry run by software built 20-40 years ago.
We have 550+ customers, backed by Accel and Y Combinator, with investors from Procore, Autodesk, and Plaid. Our three co-founders have worked together for 12+ years, across Graphiq (acquired by Amazon in 2017) and Amazon.
We’ve built something people actually need, in a market most of Silicon Valley ignores — which is exactly why we’re winning. The only thing slowing us down is hiring. Our team is small, scrappy, and high-caliber, and we’re looking for the next wave of builders who will help take Agave from breakout startup to category-defining company.
Early-stage, yet de-risked: we are a rare combo of being early stage (high upside) but lower risk (thousands of contractors using us, hockey-stick growth). You get the benefits of an early stage startup without the risk you’ll have at almost any other startup. You’ll have a ton of impact, work directly with our customers, and get to work on interesting technical challenges you won’t see at bigger companies. Although we’re early stage, we’ve eliminated key strategic risks you’ll face at other startups. Like an unproven product, lack of market validation, lack of revenue,
Momentum is accelerating: our AI products are the fastest-growing part of the business, with a third of new deals now including one. Channel partnerships are fueling that growth too: we signed 8 new ones in the last month alone. We’re all young and hungry. Most of us moved to SF from far away (Canada, SoCal, Texas, Virginia) specifically to build Agave from the ground up.
Team is technical, diverse, young: you'll work with a formidable founding team that's experienced, intense, and ambitious. The cofounders worked together for 10 years, first at a startup that Amazon acquired, then at Amazon, and now at Agave. You'll learn a ton while having outsized ownership. You’ll have a front-row seat to the good and bad of building a company from the ground up.
Huge opportunity without direct competition: startups are incredibly hard, so you want to join one that has a unique advantage. You don’t want to spend years of your life on a company in a saturated market with tons of competition. We’re seizing an opportunity that’s massive (Construction is the world’s third-largest industry) but also overlooked by most people in startup land. Most who can solve this problem aren’t aware it exists or are too distracted by tech trends (blockchain, metaverse, LLMs, etc.) to notice. These talented folks get coaxed into building products that seem cool early on, but don’t solve durable problems or aren’t differentiated enough against their many competitors to be sustainable (e.g. lots of AI products), so they end-up not going anywhere or stagnating without a clear plan to grow profitably. As a result, we have a multi-year head start against potential competitors, increasing our odds of success significantly. We’re also backed by world-class investors (Accel, YC) and Construction insiders (Procore and Autodesk executives, founders of the largest construction tech companies like PlanGrid).
Requirements
Exceptional college grads with strong intern/co-op experience, ideally from a top undergraduate university
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science
Self-motivated, high ownership, low ego; desire to work on a fast-paced, intense, fun team. Passion for building a world-class engineering culture.
Pumped to work in-person with us in SF 5 days/week.
No need to have: prior experience with our tech stack or at B2B SaaS/API company
Interesting technical challenges?
Unification: we’re unifying dozens-to-hundreds of fragmented systems under a single standard that we define. Our unification covers data objects, data models, authentication, account-linking UX, and features like filters and pagination. When designing any new feature, we have to do it in a scalable way. For example, when adding filters, we have to research each system we support (and plan to support) and create a generic, system-agnostic solution.
On-prem: we’re connecting with many types of on-prem systems (SQL-based, DLL-based, API-based), many built 20-40 years ago. We provide tremendous value to customers allowing them to interface with these systems in a secure, fast, reliable way, as if they’re modern, cloud-based products. We need to support real-time communication and webhooks when they don’t exist (e.g., using web-sockets).
Scale & speed: we’re handling millions of API requests per day, and growing daily. For our products that we power with our own API (e.g. Analytics), we need to store and retrieve large amounts of data in an efficient way, building elegant caching layers to reduce latency. We ship code daily and iterate quickly based on actual feedback from paying customers (they share tons!).
Operational excellence: we’re creating a reliable API layer on top of many old systems that don’t have APIs. It’s like building a skyscraper on quicksand, enforced by SLAs. We need to innovate in expanding the depth and breadth of our integrations while simultaneously increasing our development velocity. We need to be very creative in how to continually test our code and integrations, creating scalable testing frameworks that can catch edge cases and bugs across 1k+ endpoints.
Mix of back-end and front-end: we’re building front-end apps that dog-food our own APIs (e.g. Sync, Analytics). This helps us build world-class APIs because we suffer any pain present in our API. We’re building both the lego blocks and the higher-level lego models: we see what kinds of APIs our SaaS customers want, then also look at the kinds of API niceties we want for our own applications (like a caching layer, advanced filtering) and implement a combination of the two.
Variety: without knowing, you might assume adding a new integration is low-ambiguity and routine. But each integration we launch is special, completely different and posing unique challenges. This requires researching that system and its nuances in great depth before building on top of it. It’s part engineering, part archeology.
Compensation
Equity: competitive equity, so you share in the upside you’re helping create.
Performance Bonuses: we offer annual performance bonuses when we hit company growth goals. For 2026, the bonus is 15% of your base salary or OTE. We've had these bonuses for the last 3 years, and expect to continue to have them in subsequent years.
401(k): we match 100% of your contributions, up to 4% of your annual salary.
Health & family
Healthcare: we cover 90% of your healthcare costs, with several plan options. We also cover a healthy portion of dependent costs.
HSA: a $100/month company contribution to your HSA.
Parental leave: up to 12 weeks of paid leave for all new parents, including adoptive and foster parents
Where you work
Relocation: a sizable bonus if you’re moving to the Bay Area, plus an extra bonus for anyone (even current Bay Area residents) who moves within a 15-minute walk of our office.
Commuter benefits: pre-tax contributions toward commuting costs, and we cover the full cost of a Muni pass if you take public transit.
Office visits: company-sponsored trips to our SF HQ at least every other month. For remote teammates, we schedule trips to overlap during “remote visit” weeks so you get real time with the team.
Visa sponsorship: we sponsor visas (H1B, TN, etc.) for candidates who are a good fit.
Perks
Food: breakfast and dinner stipends through DoorDash, plus a kitchen stocked with coffee, snacks, and drinks.
Gym: on-site gym with Peloton, squat rack, Tempo, Yoga setup, and more.
We've built Agave in-person since day 1, and will maintain an in-person culture in San Francisco going forward for candidates in the Bay Area. We also will provide a significant relocation bonus for candidates who want to move to the Bay Area.
Our office is at 101 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, right near Salesforce Park, coffee shops & restaurants, and a bustling downtown. We believe building in-person is a huge strategic advantage, and we hope you’ll join us.
At each stage, we decide within 24hrs and update you shortly after.
Intro (15min): informal chat for you to learn more about the role. We'll ask for details on past projects. We want to know that you can code, and speak about your work clearly. You’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at Agave makes sense for you.
Coding (50min): you'll meet with one of our Founding SWEs. They’ll ask you 1-2 coding questions in your language of preference. We’ll test how you write, test, and debug solutions, and identify tradeoffs.
Customer Needs Problem (50min): we'll ask you to design a feature to meet a customer need based on one of our actual application components. You'll do the work to understand the requirements, translate those to specs, and iterate on the solution as you learn more about the customer's needs. This will intentionally have more ambiguity than a typical coding-style question.
On-site [In-Person in SF, we pay for the trip]: a real-world coding exercise based on a ticket, using a coding assistant, with check-ins with our engineers throughout the day. The day also includes lunch with the team and ends with a behavioral interview.
Agave builds AI-powered financial infrastructure for construction, connecting project systems with ERP to streamline accounting and provide real-time financial visibility for field and back-office teams. Its platform starts with ERP Sync to align jobs, financials, and timesheets between project management tools like Autodesk Build and Procore and ERP; it also includes AP Invoice Automation that captures invoices, matches them to the right job and cost code, routes for approval, and syncs to ERP. It also offers Expense Management, Vendor Compliance, AI Analytics, and Agave MCP for querying ERP/project data via chat assistants, with integrations to systems such as QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint, Acumatica, Procore, and Autodesk Build. The goal is to speed up construction finance operations, reduce blind spots, and help contractors move projects faster and more efficiently.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$18.5M
Headquarters
San Francisco, null
Founded
2021
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Agave raises $15M Series A for Construction AI tools. Last Updated: 8 July 2026 Co-founder of JustAINews Key Points * Agave raised $15 million in a Series A round to expand its AI powered financial tools for construction contractors. * Accel led the round with continued participation from YCombinator, bringing Agave's total funding past $20 million. * The company serves over 500 contractors and automates accounting workflows across more than 14 ERP systems. Credits: Y Combinator / LinkedIn Agave, a startup that builds AI tools for construction accounting, has raised $15 million in a Series A round. The company was founded in late 2021 by Tom Reno, John Zucchi, and Pooria Azimi. Its pitch is straightforward: connect the financial software that contractors already use and automate the manual work around it. Rather than asking construction firms to adopt new systems, Agave plugs into their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and project management platforms, which are the software tools that contractors rely on to track costs, manage projects, and run their books. The round comes at a time when the construction industry is losing experienced workers faster than it can replace them. According to Deloitte, the sector will need an estimated 499,000 new workers in 2026, up from 439,000 in 2025. The National Center for Construction Education and Research estimates that 41% of the current construction workforce will retire by 2031. That includes the accountants, project managers, and finance staff who keep the back office running. As those people leave, the knowledge they carry leaves with them, and contractors need new ways to keep up. Accel led the round. The venture capital firm also led Agave's earlier seed round. YCombinator, the startup accelerator, participated again. Total funding now stands at more than $20 million. Why construction accounting is hard to automate Construction accounting works differently from almost every other kind. Each project runs as its own profit center. Costs are tracked by job, phase, and cost code. Scope regularly shifts mid-build through change orders, which are formal adjustments to a contract's price or scope. Most general purpose accounting software does not support these workflows. The construction specific systems that do are often decades old, run on local servers, and were built without the modern programming interfaces (called APIs) that let different software talk to each other. That gap is what makes AI adoption in construction both difficult and potentially valuable. The global AI in construction market was valued at roughly $4.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at about 25% per year through 2034. A 2026 industry report from ServiceTitan found that 38% of commercial contractors now see measurable results from AI, up from 17% one year earlier. But most contractors still run on fragmented software, and only 20% of firms report using a single integrated platform. "Most energy in AI goes into building new software. The bigger opportunity is deploying AI to operate on systems companies already depend on, helping enterprises get more out of what they have today. Agave does this for construction, going straight at the messy, domain-specific problems most teams avoid. It's a rare combination of experienced team and market need, and they're the ones to capitalize on the opportunity." Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel How Agave plans to use the $15M The new capital will go toward hiring and expanding the company's product line. Agave already serves more than 500 general and specialty contractors across the United States and Canada. Its customers range from firms with $5 million in annual revenue to those exceeding $5 billion, and its products are used across more than 80,000 construction projects representing over $100 billion in project volume. Today, the product suite includes cross-system data synchronization, invoice automation for accounts payable, expense management, AI powered analytics, vendor compliance checking, and a custom agent builder that lets users automate workflows specific to their business. The funding will help Agave expand these tools and reach more contractors. The company has been profitable for more than two years. It tripled its revenue year over year, which suggests the new capital is about growth, not survival. Customers report saving more than 60 hours per month on tasks like data entry, financial reporting, and cost reconciliation across systems. What Agave does and how it works Agave spent four years building two-way connections with more than 14 ERP and project management systems, including Procore and Autodesk Forma Build. Two-way means the software can both pull data from and push data back into those systems. That is what allows Agave to automate entire workflows end to end, rather than handling only isolated steps. In practice, the tools give construction field teams access to real-time financial data from ERPs inside the project management platforms they already use every day. The platform automatically codes, reconciles, and imports invoices and credit card transactions into ERPs. It can also check lengthy insurance documents against a contractor's requirements before approving a new vendor. Customers report reducing the time spent on these tasks by more than 80% across thousands of monthly transactions. "AI adoption in construction won't come from replacing existing systems, but from enabling AI to work seamlessly with them. Agave helps contractors unlock the value of AI on top of the tools that already run their business, turning siloed data and manual processes into streamlined workflows that allow contractors to take on more jobs at higher margins, without painful system migrations or training an army of new employees." Tom Reno, Cofounder and CEO of Agave Agave's customers span commercial, civil, and residential construction, along with specialty trades such as electrical, roofing, and concrete. Named customers include Evans General Contractors, Stacy Witbeck, Brinkman Construction, Satterfield & Pontikes, and RW Dake. The investors behind Agave's Series A Accel led both the seed round and this Series A. The firm first backed Agave in August 2023, when it led the company's seed round. YCombinator also continued its investment. With this round, Agave has raised more than $20 million in total funding since its founding. Vas Natarajan, a Partner at Accel, has led the firm's involvement with Agave. Natarajan joined Accel in 2010 and focuses on early stage companies in data infrastructure, APIs, and enterprise software. He is based in the Bay Area and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. At the time of the seed investment, Natarajan described Agave as a company that blends deep knowledge of construction technology's data problems with fast execution. Funding details. * Company name: Agave * Funding round: Series A * Date: July 2026 * Funding amount: $15 million * Lead investors: Accel Get the industry's biggest AI news straight to your inbox.
Agave, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an AI platform for construction financials, raised $15M in Series A funding
Agave raises $15M Series A to bring AI to construction financials. Backed by Accel, Agave streamlines financial workflows on top of contractors' existing systems, during critical moment as 41% of industry workforce retires in the next five years SAN FRANCISCO-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Agave, the AI platform for construction financials, today announced it raised a $15M Series A funding round from Accel, who led Agave's Seed round, with continued participation from YCombinator. The round brings Agave's total funding to over $20 million since its origin in late 2021. Founded by Tom Reno, John Zucchi, and Pooria Azimi, Agave will use the new capital to expand its team and scale its growing suite of products, which already help hundreds of contractors boost their team's productivity by automating accounting and back-office work. This raise comes on the heels of exceptional growth for Agave. The company has been profitable for over two years, tripled its revenue year-over-year, and works with more than 500 general and specialty contractors from $5 million to more than $5 billion in annual revenue. Its customers span commercial, civil, and residential construction and trades including electrical, roofing, and concrete, like Evans General Contractors, Stacy Witbeck, Brinkman Construction, Satterfield & Pontikes, and RW Dake. Today, Agave is used across more than 80,000 construction projects in the U.S. and Canada, representing more than $100 billion in project volume. Agave customers report saving more than 60 hours per month on tasks like data entry, financial reporting and cost reconciliation across systems. Controlling finances is critical to maintaining profit margins on construction projects, which typically span years, require unexpected changes mid-project, and involve dozens of otherwise unrelated companies. The accounting behind it differs significantly from standard business rules. Every project runs as its own profit center, costs are tracked by job, phase, and cost code, and scope shifts mid-build through change orders. Generic accounting systems and AI tools do not support these nuances, and the systems that do are decades old, on-prem or hosted on remote servers, and built without modern APIs. "AI adoption in construction won't come from replacing existing systems, but from enabling AI to work seamlessly with them," said Tom Reno, cofounder and CEO of Agave. "Agave helps contractors unlock the value of AI on top of the tools that already run their business, turning siloed data and manual processes into streamlined workflows that allow contractors to take on more jobs at higher margins, without painful system migrations or training an army of new employees." Agave spent four years forging partnerships with the major construction platforms and building proprietary, two-way connections with more than 14 ERP and project management systems. These two-way connections enable Agave to access data and automate complete workflows end to end, where other tools with simpler connections can manage only isolated pieces. Agave's products reflect this focus on integration and augmentation over replacement. They give construction field teams real-time financial data from ERPs inside project management systems like Procore and Autodesk Forma Build, and automatically code, reconcile, and import invoices and credit-card transactions to ERPs. Agave helps onboard new vendors by comparing long insurance documents against predefined requirements before approving them to do work and receive payments. Users can also build their own AI agents, automating business-specific workflows that pre-built tools can't support. Customers report over 80% reduction in time spent across thousands of tasks per month. Agave helps the industry confront a looming challenge: 41% of the construction workforce will retire in the next five years, and only 10% of the entire workforce is under 25 years old. The experienced staff who manage current processes are exiting faster than younger workers are entering. Agave's solutions are becoming increasingly essential to the future of construction, helping companies codify institutional knowledge, automate work, and augment teams with tools that boost their productivity. "Most energy in AI goes into building new software. The bigger opportunity is deploying AI to operate on systems companies already depend on, helping enterprises get more out of what they have today," said Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel. "Agave does this for construction, going straight at the messy, domain-specific problems most teams avoid. It's a rare combination of experienced team and market need, and they're the ones to capitalize on the opportunity." "We've more than doubled in size over the past few years, and Agave's been a big reason my team can keep up without adding headcount," said Ken Pattridge, CFO of RW Dake Construction. "Agave keeps our Project Management and ERP data in sync automatically, so the numbers from the field, like change orders, show up in our accounting system without anyone rekeying them. And the AI does in minutes what would otherwise take us days. I've had it turn a master job report into tailored financials for each of our 47 PMs, and with a few more prompts, scan months of activity across hundreds of credit cards to catch expenses coded incorrectly that we should've billed to clients. That kind of analysis used to take days of manual work to pull together, so it often never got done. I don't know how we'd keep up without Agave now." About Agave Agave is the AI platform for construction financials, built to work seamlessly with the systems contractors already use. It serves general and specialty contractors, connecting more than 14 ERP and project management systems across cloud, hosted, and on-prem environments. Agave's products include cross-system data integration and AI tools for AP invoice automation, expenses management, vendor compliance, analytics and agent building. Profitable and backed by Accel and YCombinator, Agave is used by more than 500 contractors across North America today.
Ottimate partnered with Agave to make it easier for construction and real estate companies to incorporate its accounts payable (AP) automation solution into their existing processes. Agave’s unified API for the construction industry will enable customers to sync data from Procore and other technologies into the Ottimate for Construction solution, the companies said in a Thursday (April 4) press release. “Customers benefit from top-tier AI-powered AP automation and [purchase order (PO)] workflows provided by Ottimate, alongside unparalleled construction and real estate management features from leading industry authorities such as Procore, Deltek and Sage Construction Management,” Krishna Janakiraman, head of engineering at Ottimate, said in the release
A lot of the most popular construction software was developed 20 to 40 years ago and many systems don’t talk to each other. As a result, the information A lot of the most popular construction software was developed 20 to 40 years ago and many systems don’t talk to each other. As a result, the information stored in them is fragmented, adding extra work for building teams. Agave, a member of Y Combinator’s latest batch, is helping with a unified API that connects with more than 30 software systems. The startup announced it has raised a $2.9 million seed round led by Accel.