Vancouver, BC, July 15, 2026 – GroundedAI, the underground intelligence platform for tunneling and underground mining, today announced the close of a $2 million financing round led by Stand Up Ventures with participation from SOSV, Accelia, BoxOne, The51, LOI VC, and other investors. The company will use the capital to accelerate its market entry into the tunneling sector at the start of the largest infrastructure investment cycle in Canadian history.
Canada is about to build – Most of it goes underground
Canada has entered a generational build-out. The federal Major Projects Office has announced 15 nation-building projects representing more than $125 billion in capital investment. The Build Communities Strong Fund is directing $51 billion into public infrastructure over the next decade, nearly doubling annual federal infrastructure spending. A national investment summit this September aims to mobilize $500 billion in private capital for energy, critical minerals, and infrastructure.
Most of that work touches the underground: What is less visible is how much of this work happens underground. Transit, expansion, pumped hydro, power transmission, water and wastewater systems, gas pipelines, and the mines supplying critical minerals all depend on tunneling and underground construction. The country’s ambition to build runs directly through the ground beneath it.
That is also where projects go wrong. Research by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world’s leading authority on megaproject performance, shows the average cost overrun on rail and urban transit is 45%. In Toronto, rail transit construction costs have increased nearly eightfold since the mid-1990s, and the Ontario Line’s budget has grown 43% mid-build. One of the largest drivers of cost overruns is ground conditions: conditions that don’t match the model, discovered too late to respond cost effectively.
« Canada has committed to building at a scale we haven’t attempted in generations, and almost all of it touches the underground, » said Shelby Yee, Co-Founder and CEO of GroundedAI. « The ground is never exactly what the contract and model say it will be. Many tunnelling projects across the world are still managing that gap with paper logs and spreadsheets. If we want this infrastructure decade to deliver, the underground needs a new intelligence layer. That’s what we’re building. »
Connecting the underground to the people who need to know
GroundedAI builds the connected workflow between field teams underground and the project decision-makers above. Its core platform includes Lithos, an iPad-based LiDAR application for underground data capture, and Strata, a web platform for georeferencing, mapping, and identifying variances from project budgets and ground models.
Together, Lithos and Strata give tunnel construction teams same-shift visibility into subsurface conditions as they evolve, replacing paper logs, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools with a system that surfaces potential multi-million dollar variances while there is still time to act. The platform is built for the conditions underground construction demands: no connectivity, fast-moving decisions, and data that has to reach the right people in hours, not days.
The company works with engineering firms and project owners across tunneling and underground mining, including Hatch, one of the world’s largest infrastructure and engineering consultancies; Delve Underground, a heavy civil engineering firm specializing in tunnel design; and the Elea iC group, one of Austria’s biggest engineering consultancies.
Why investors are backing GroundedAI
« We’re entering an infrastructure investment cycle that is generational in scale, and the tools being used underground have not kept pace with the complexity or the stakes, » said Lucas Perlman, Principal at Stand Up Ventures. « GroundedAI has built for the actual conditions of this work. The traction they have with tier-one engineering firms at this stage of the company is a strong signal. »
About GroundedAI
GroundedAI builds underground intelligence software for tunneling and mining. Its products, Lithos and Strata, give field teams a connected workflow for capturing, mapping, reporting, and identifying variances in subsurface conditions in real time. The company is headquartered in Vancouver, BC, and works with engineering firms and project owners across North America, South America, Australia, and Europe.
Media contact:
Shelby Yee
Co-Founder and CEO, GroundedAI
contact@groundedai.com
Le communiqué de presse est en version anglaise seulement
