Shovels Wants to Dig Up America’s Missing Data with $5M Seed

In the U.S., there are over 20,000 building permit jurisdictions, each with its own quirks, file formats, and arcane rules. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) the torrent of information flowing through city planning departments every day, no centralized, standardized database exists. The result? A fractured mirror of America’s construction activity, one that’s invisible to most businesses, policymakers, and even the contractors doing the work.

That’s the puzzle Ryan Buckley is trying to solve with Shovels, a startup that uses AI to systematically clean, enrich, and standardize building permit and contractor data. Founded in 2022, the company has already raised $6.5 million total in funding, including a $5 million seed round led by Base10 Partners this week. Its ambition: to become the definitive source of truth for hyperlocal, high-value public data.

“If you’re putting on a new roof, that’s actually a really good time to put on solar panels,” Buckley explained to Commercial Observer. “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”.

The idea behind Shovels came from a remodel. After a smooth home renovation, Buckley watched his neighbors suffer through a disaster of a project. “I felt bad for them, angry at the guys they hired, and wondered what the difference was between the contractor we hired and the one they went with”. That observation kicked off a journey that culminated in Shovels.

What Buckley discovered was staggering: there was an ocean of public permit data, records of inspections, construction timelines, approvals, but it was scattered across jurisdictions, messy, and fundamentally unusable at scale. For a self-professed lover of “relentlessly painful scraping projects,” it was a dream.

He teamed up with Luka Kacil, a veteran of high-scale data extraction, to co-found Shovels. “We can now build an AI-native scraping infrastructure fine-tuned for local government data,” said Buckley, who credited Kacil, now CTO, with helping architect the technical foundation.

The Infrastructure of Insight

What differentiates Shovels is how it makes sense of the data it scrapes from government websites. The startup uses specialized LLMs to extract meaning, apply structure, and tag each permit according to a unified schema. “With over 170M+ permits nationwide, spread across 20k+ independent permit jurisdictions, standardization is no joke,” wrote a Shovels team member. “Every city or county has its own permitting terminology, standards, and requirements”.

The AI pipeline reads each permit’s description, type, and sub-type and assigns one or more of over 20 tags like “SOLAR,” “ELECTRICAL,” or “REMODEL” to ensure comparability across jurisdictions. This allows Shovels’ clients, from solar companies to real estate developers, to slice, filter, and act on the data with precision.

City officials and economic development directors are also a target audience. “We can really start thinking hard about building permit reform or just permit reform in general,” Buckley said. “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”.

Project Wolverine and the Platform Bet

Shovels’ new $5M seed funding is backing what Buckley calls “Project Wolverine,” an AI re-architecture of the company’s entire data collection pipeline to enable daily updates across more jurisdictions. “The best coverage money can buy is only 15% of permit jurisdictions; we have less than 10%,” he said in his June 2025 newsletter. “This is the opportunity: companies have been aggregating permit data for 30 years and the leader in the market is still only at 15% coverage? You deserve better. We deserve better”.

Within one data release on Wolverine, Shovels processed 1.2 million permit updates and brought 300 new jurisdictions online: 30 times the typical monthly average. “All signs are looking great that we’ll be able to move to regular weekly updates sometime next quarter,” Buckley wrote.

Shovels doesn’t plan to stop at permits. “Collecting everything else (business licenses, health inspections, budgets, contracts, meeting minutes) is a very big idea. That’s venture scale. That’s also what we’re going to do”. This will broaden its value proposition beyond construction

This ambition tracks with his platform-first mindset. “Point solutions don’t capture the most value: platforms do,” he wrote in 2024. “Have a platform mentality from the beginning. Be scrappy about how your resources are spent… Use those data to build products for a defined niche and make those customers very happy. Let them tell you where to expand”.

Shovels’ end goal is clear. As Buckley wrote, “With a smaller federal government and more domestic production, local governments become more important. This is the big idea behind Shovels. Local government data, all of it”. Shovels wants to redefine transparency in the built environment, by doing the hard work of making data real, usable, and economically significant.