Why We Invested in Kaya AI
About Optimist Ventures
Optimist Ventures invests in the implementation of artificial intelligence across three sectors mission-critical to the global economy: insurance, industrials, and healthcare. Constituting nearly 50% of the national workforce and GDP, our core verticals are faced with vast pools of siloed, underutilized data and employee demographic aging. We are optimistic that human-led technological solutions will enhance worker productivity in parallel to dignity and pride.
Introducing Kaya AI
Kaya AI is a supply chain intelligence platform for the construction industry. Kaya’s platform consolidates data from systems like Procore and Oracle to automate delivery scheduling and lead-time tracking for general contractors (“GCs”). Optimist Ventures is thrilled to announce its participation, and maiden investment, into Kaya AI as the company launches from stealth with a $5.3M pre-seed round alongside 53 Stations, Suffolk Technologies, Barclays, Mantis VC, Virta Ventures, and Soma Capital.
Here are three reasons for why we invested in Kaya
1 — The most successful AI applications will be built by “multilingual” teams
The Kaya team combines forward-thinking technical expertise with practical industry-specific know-how. Ojonimi Bako (Co-founder & CEO) brings deep construction and supply chain experience, while Nick Selz (Co-founder, President) delivers innovative tech, product and go-to-market experience from 11 years at YouTube brand strategy. While enrolled in Suffolk Technology’s accelerator, Ojonimi and Nick relentlessly iterated side-by-side with general contractors, bridging data siloes to develop a platform defining the future of construction software. Customer reviews from RXR Realty (proudly introduced by Optimist Ventures!) were stellar, and Kaya was named amongst the Top 50 AI Startups of 2025 by Cemex Ventures. Having followed the team for a year before investment, it became clear to us that Kaya had deeply embedded itself in construction workflows and data pools, and had reached a key developmental inflection point.
2 — A clear product-problem fit
Great companies are defined by what they solve — the bigger and hairier the problem, the more valuable the solution. The construction industry is hamstrung by complex supply chains, legacy tech stacks, dropping productivity and acute worker shortages. While much of the US economy has seen novel technologies magnify per-FTE value through disintermediation and software-native solutions, the construction sector has seen the inverse (see below).
Why is this? In short, opaque “unknown unknowns” and highly manual workflows are inflating GC budgets and leading to rampant delays, with more intermediaries and supply chain hiccups than ever before.
Kaya has a 2-pronged solution to this:
A Bloomberg Terminal-style source of truth for GCs: Kaya scours real-time and historical data siloes to deliver novel datapoints for insight on where, and why, runaway spend occurs; early notices of supply chain disruptions; and overviews of which teams are over- vs. under-delivering.
Agentic workflows, offloading repetitive, manual tasks: Through an AI agent named Jarvis, a 24/7 omni-channel assistant, Kaya automates supply chain scheduling and follows up on loose lead times. Recouping time spent on repetitive, manual, administrative tasks, Kaya accelerates go-to-market times for mission critical projects and increases human impact.
As with the mobile wave, the market-wide shift in focus from AI infrastructure build-out to application layer precedes clarity regarding where value will accrue across the AI tech stack. We are navigating this by seeking AI-first companies with early, but proven, ROIs. In Kaya’s case, an 80% time-savings on procurement management (which ends up saving ~ 1/3rd of a year’s worth in time per team), and 100% supply chain issue flagging rate elicited overwhelmingly positive reviews from some of the US’s largest construction contractors.
3 — A Wedge to Workflow
Kaya’s daily engagement passes the “toothbrush test” that Nick had learned at Google — asking whether a product can become as ubiquitous in user workflows as a toothbrush is in daily life. Kaya’s procurement and delivery focus is just the beginning, and we believe in the team’s broader vision to embed itself as an end-to-end construction and fintech platform, or a “Bloomberg Terminal” for the construction industry.
Additionally, in an age of Stargate and massive US-wide infrastructural spend, Kaya is now expanding its scope to focus on data center construction. These rapidly-evolving, mission-critical projects are quickly becoming geopolitical assets, necessitating speed and complex, to-the-hour coordination — something that only data-efficient software solutions like Kaya’s can enable.
The Optimist Ventures team believes that Kaya will become integral to the global construction ecosystem, and are excited to partner with the team in support of their continued success.