Germany-based Arctis AI has raised a million-dollar pre-seed round. The round was led by PT1, with participation from EWOR, Superangels, and a notable group of industry figures including Alexander Schwörer of PERI, Sebastian Johnston of La Famiglia, Christian Vollmann of C1 Green Chemicals, Daniel Bronk of B+V Union, and Christian Marquart of Marvel Fusion. As revealed to TFN, the company stated, “We have raised over $1 million in total funding to date.”
With the new capital, the company plans to further strengthen its technical team, develop additional modules, and expand its customer base across Europe. The company’s long-term ambition is clear: to reduce operational drag and risk in the most critical administrative processes and to build the infrastructure that can support the next generation of projects.
A uniquely talented team behind Arctis AI
Arctis AI was founded by Dila Ekrem, Duc-Trung Nguyen, and Leon Stawowiak. As discussed with TFN, Dila is a former No. 1-ranked Turkish fencer and has won 35+ medals nationally and internationally. She studied at TUM (Management and Computer Engineering) and collaborated on research with the MIT Murray Lab. Before Arctis AI, she worked closely with early-stage founders, including as Founder’s Associate at the Lightspeed-backed Manex AI.
Dila spent her teenage years training and travelling for competitions with the Turkish national team. Growing up around her father’s small custom shirt shop, she learned early what it means to build something with your hands and serve customers. Moving to Munich was her first time living in Germany. She arrived without a network, built her way into the startup ecosystem from scratch, and joined EWOR, where she took the step from student to founder.
Duc-Trung Nguyen completed an M.Sc. in Computer Science from TUM and was previously an AI engineer at SAP. He led multiple engineering teams and got international academic experience, including EPFL and Imperial College London as well. When Trung moved from Vietnam to Munich, he supported himself through jobs like delivery driving for Flink and restaurant work while building software on the side. He won hackathons, completed his degree, contributed to research collaborations, and eventually joined SAP to work on AI systems. Despite a stable career path at SAP, he chose to leave to build a product of his own.
Leon Stawowiak has a background in Management and Computer Engineering at TUM and worked in strategy consulting at Bain and KPMG, including projects around AI use cases and implementations for large enterprises. Leon grew up with close exposure to construction through his family and developed a strong interest in the commercial mechanics behind large projects. He was on track for a long-term consulting career focused on enterprise AI, but chose instead to build software for the recurring operational problems he kept hearing about in construction contract processes.
Together, the trio launched Arctis AI in August 2025. Within just three months, they deployed their first pilot project in Germany, an unusually fast turnaround for a company targeting a traditionally slow-moving sector. To scale, they have already made key technical hires from AWS, Snowflake, and Palantir, setting a strong foundation for product development.
Modernises Europe’s most complex sector
Construction and real estate are Europe’s largest industries, yet much of their administration still relies on outdated, disconnected workflows. This is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Europe faces a €584 billion demand for power grid upgrades and another €500 billion needed for transport infrastructure modernisation by 2030. As new residential projects, rail expansions, and bridge repairs pile up, the old systems cannot keep pace.
Arctis AI aims to provide the technological leap the industry has long lacked. By bringing structure and clarity to the administrative core of projects, the company is stepping into a space where operational complexity has become a significant bottleneck.
In response to the primary motivation behind its debut, Arctis AI stated, “It was primarily market-driven. Over the past year, in repeated conversations with construction professionals, the same pain points kept coming up, and it became clear there is a meaningful gap in the market. We started building alongside ongoing customer discovery and iterated quickly based on feedback, expanding the product around the workflows where teams feel the most day-to-day friction and risk.”
Diversity statistics of the team
As discussed above, the founding team includes one woman (Turkish background) and two men (Vietnamese background and Polish-German background). Early engineering hires include team members with Indian, Chinese, Russian, and German backgrounds.
Turning contracts into AI agents
Arctis AI is building AI agents that help construction companies structure, access, and work with contracts throughout the project lifecycle. Instead of treating contracts as static documents, the platform structures them into one central hub where obligations, risks, payment terms, and dependencies are transparent and usable for commercial and project teams.
By replacing scattered files with a cohesive workflow, Arctis AI enables teams to align faster, reduce friction across stakeholders, and keep projects consistent from tender to close-out, giving general contractors and developers a more precise and efficient way to deliver Europe’s most critical builds.
What sets Arctis AI apart from competitors?
Arctis AI is building agentic AI infrastructure for complex construction and infrastructure projects. Instead of storing contracts as static documents, we connect contract and project documentation into a workflow where AI agents help teams keep obligations, commercial terms, and changes aligned from tender through close-out. What sets us apart is that we are built for multi-party, multi-contract project delivery, focusing on keeping entire contract ecosystems consistent over time rather than managing documents in isolation.
What are the plans for the next three to five years?
The company stated, “We aim to become the end-to-end operating layer for construction contracts, managing obligations, changes, payments, and performance from tender through close-out across entire project ecosystems. We land with high-ROI workflows and expand across modules, projects, and supply chains, scaling from Europe into the Middle East.”
“Construction teams are delivering increasingly complex projects, but the administrative systems behind them have barely changed,” said Leon Stawowiak, Co-Founder of Arctis AI. “Back-office work is still dominated by PDFs, spreadsheets, and email. We are building the tools to finally change this, removing the constant manual overhead behind projects and meeting demand with better technology.”
