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This startup made AI agents to manage construction projects like data centers. See the pitch deck it used to raise $9 million.

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Krane, a startup building AI software for construction supply chains, has raised $9 million in funding.

The San Francisco-based startup has developed AI agents that help construction teams manage materials procurement and delivery for projects such as data centers, healthcare facilities, and schools.

Its platform pulls in data from spreadsheets, project schedules, and supplier communications into a single system. It then uses AI agents to automate tasks such as tracking orders, following up with vendors by phone or email, and reconciling invoices.

Eshan Jayamanne, the founder and CEO of Krane, told Business Insider that his company’s platform typically starts by identifying the equipment and materials specified in a construction project.

“Then we look at ‘what are all my quotes across all my suppliers, and who can I actually work with’ by comparing lead times, by comparing requirements for the spec. This is where AI comes in,” he said.

The startup has created multiple AI agents that specialize in different areas of the supply chain, such as deliveries and flagging supply risks.

Jayamanne, a former engineer and construction operator who worked on data center projects, founded the company in 2023. It aims to reduce delays in construction projects and prevent them from going over budget, and integrates with existing construction tools like Autodesk and Procore.

About half of Krane’s customers are healthcare projects, and around a third are data center buildouts, Jayamanne said. Data centers are complex projects that can be held up by any delays to critical equipment, such as generators, he added.

Construction tech has become increasingly competitive, and companies like TrunkTools and Mastt are also leaning into AI agents. While construction has historically been slower than other industries to adopt software tools, Jayamanne says that’s no longer true.

“This LLM moment has changed everything,” he said, referring to large language models, the technology underpinning AI like ChatGPT.

Jayamanne said that humans are “in the loop” to approve the decisions of Krane’s AI agents, but its voice agents have greater autonomy.

The startup’s seed round was co-led by Glasswing Ventures and Link Ventures.

The new funding will be used to expand its product and add new features, including tools aimed at subcontractors and additional automation for procurement and payments.

“I’m really focused on raising ‘just enough’ because larger rounds don’t make sense anymore,” he said, adding that companies like his can use AI to operate with smaller engineering teams.

Here’s an exclusive look at the nine-page pitch deck Krane used to raise $9 million.




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Big Tech’s new reality: Data centers are a war target

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As Anthropic and the Pentagon clashed over how the military should use AI, another new reality of warfare emerged several thousand miles away: data centers are now targets.

This week, Amazon said that three of its data centers in the Middle East — two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain — had been damaged by drone strikes during the US-Iran war.

Amazon Web Services, its cloud division, evacuated staff and closed access to at least one data center due to “structural damage” and flooding caused by the Sunday attacks, according to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider.

The two UAE data centers were “directly struck,” while the Bahrain site was damaged by a drone strike “in close proximity,” Amazon said Monday.

On Wednesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took responsibility for strategically targeting one of the Amazon sites due to the company’s support for the US military activities, Iran’s state media said. Business Insider could not independently verify this information.

It is the first time that Big Tech data centers have been directly targeted by military strikes, and it brings a new threat to the doorstep of companies that have invested heavily in the region to keep pace with the AI boom.

The Middle East has around 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, with an additional 1.7 GW in the pipeline, DC Byte, a data center intelligence company, told Business Insider. Most of the planned capacity right now is for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the firm added. 1 GW is roughly equivalent to the power needed to run the homes of a midsize city like San Francisco.

The IRGC also claimed responsibility for targeting a Microsoft site in the Middle East.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no indication of any attack and that its data centers in the region were operating as normal.

Neither Google nor Microsoft’s data centers have shown any outages in the region this week, according to their service pages.

As of Friday, service at the damaged Amazon data centers remains offline or heavily disrupted. The company has recommended that customers “enact their disaster recovery plans.”

The outages underscored how dependent much of the world’s technology is on data centers. Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of the Dubai-based ride-hailing and food delivery app Careem, said earlier this week that some of its services were “impacted by an external AWS UAE outage” and had since been restored. Various banking apps also saw disruptions throughout the week.

An Amazon spokesperson pointed to the AWS Service Health Dashboard for the latest updates. A Google spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Defending data centers

Data centers are typically designed to be resilient, with workloads often distributed across different regions to limit the impact of a single location being knocked offline.

However, as the AI boom clashes against turmoil in the Middle East, the billions of dollars being poured into data centers come with more risk as a new warfare strategy emerges.

“Data centers have become the new infrastructure for economies,” said James Lewis, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you think about how people are going to build infrastructure, before it was railroads and steam engines. Now it’s data centers and fiber optics.”

The outages experienced by some services this week further highlighted how data centers could be considered a key infrastructure target in warfare.

Lewis cited the Russia-Ukraine war as another recent example in which data became central to the conflict, as Ukraine took steps to prevent Russia from accessing data stored on the country’s servers.

“The thing that has changed now in the Gulf is that people need to think about ‘how do we defend them?'” said Lewis.

Data centers emit a big heat signature that makes them difficult to hide, Lewis said.

“You’re not going to be able to hide them. The question is, can you harden them? Can you defend them? That’s what people haven’t thought about because we didn’t have to before,” he added.

Saudi Arabia is moving quickly to expand its data center capacity and position itself as a major global player in AI. The country last year launched Humain, a new company designed to build a full-stack AI ecosystem from data centers up to the models. Humain has also struck partnerships with Nvidia and AMD to build out data centers with their chips.

Meanwhile, tech giants are pledging to invest more in the region. In November, Microsoft said it plans to have invested $7.9 billion in the UAE by 2029, while Amazon pledged more than $5 billion as part of a strategic partnership with Humain last year.




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Amazon says 3 data centers damaged by drone strikes in Middle East

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Amazon said three of its data centers in the Middle East were damaged by drone strikes due to the US-Iran conflict in the region.

Two facilities in the United Arab Emirates sustained direct hits, while a third facility in Bahrain was damaged by a drone strike “in close proximity,” the company said in an update on its AWS cloud service dashboard on Monday afternoon.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” the company added in the update.

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One of Amazon’s data centers in the UAE caught fire after being hit by ‘objects’ amid the Middle East conflict

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  • Amazon Web Services had a power outage at one of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday.
  • The fire was caused by “objects” that impacted the facility at around 7:30 a.m. ET.
  • The impact sparked a fire. Firefighters cut power to the facility while they extinguished it.

Amazon Web Services said on Sunday that connectivity from one of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates was down after a fire at the facility.

AWS, Amazon’s cloud service, said that one of its “Availability Zones” had been “impacted by objects” at around 7:30 a.m. ET. The impact created “sparks and fire,” per AWS.

“The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire,” the company said.

The company did not say in its statement what the objects were.

According to Amazon’s website, an availability zone can comprise one or more data centers. The company has three availability zones in the UAE, per its coverage map.

The Sunday fire at the AWS facility happened amid US and Israeli military strikes on Iran and retaliatory attacks from the Iranian military on at least half a dozen Gulf states.

Read more about the US-Iran conflict

Photos and videos showed missiles streaking across the sky in Dubai on Saturday and Sunday. Fallout from intercepted missiles caused fires and other problems across the region. The Fairmont’s famed luxury property on the Palm saw damage, as did Dubai’s main airport and the Burj Al-Arab hotel.

Just before 7:30 p.m. ET, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some systems, but power was still down at the center.

“We do not have an ETA for power restoration at this time. For customers that can, we recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where applicable,” the company said in its Sunday evening statement.




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Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s idea of putting data centers in space is ‘ridiculous’

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman famously don’t agree on much.

The latest point of contention: data centers in space. Musk has made it a priority. Altman thinks it’s a fantasy, at least for now.

“I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous,” Altman said during a live interview with local media in New Delhi on Friday, causing audience members to laugh.

Altman said that orbital data centers could “make sense someday,” but factors like launch costs and the difficulty of repairing a computer chip in space remain overwhelming obstacles.

“We are not there yet,” Altman added. “There will come a time. Space is great for a lot of things. Orbital data centers are not something that’s going to matter at scale this decade.”

Musk would almost certainly disagree.

While many Big Tech and AI companies are spending billions on data center construction on Earth, Musk’s eyes are on the stars, per usual. Orbital data centers are his latest ambition, as he mentioned in an all-hands xAI meeting in December.

In February, SpaceX said its goal is to launch a “constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers.” The company has already begun hiring engineers to make that happen.

During an all-hands meeting with xAI employees this month, Musk said SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI will allow them to deploy the orbital data centers faster.

Despite Altman’s skepticism, other tech leaders are also racing to place data centers in space. Google’s Project Suncatcher, unveiled in November 2025, aims to do just that. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Fox News Sunday the company could start placing data centers — powered by the sun — in space as early as 2027.

Tech and AI companies rely on data centers to power their products, like large language models and chatbots. Those data centers, however, can deplete water resources, strain power grids, increase pollution, and decrease the overall quality of life.

An investigation by Business Insider published last year found that over 1,200 data centers had been approved for construction across the US by the end of 2024, nearly four times the number from 2010.

Now, proposed data center campuses in Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere are increasingly facing stiff resistance from local communities.




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Big Tech wants more data centers. Residents in this New Jersey city said not here.

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Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Ben Dziobek’s voice rang across the night as he ran toward a crowd waiting outside New Brunswick City Hall on Wednesday.

The news? Members of the city council struck down potential plans to build a data center.

“They canceled it! They canceled it!” Dziobek shouts in footage shared by New Jersey’s Climate Revolution Action Network. Loud cheers followed, and then a chant: “The people, united, will never be defeated!”

The New Brunswick City Council had just decided to remove data centers from the list of permitted uses in a plan to redevelop several parcels of land. While no data center had yet been proposed, even the possibility that a data center could someday end up there raised alarm among city residents.

“The city administration is asking the council to amend the redevelopment plan to remove data centers as a permitted use, and to reinsert the requirement for inclusion of a park on the site that’s provided in the prior redevelopment,” New Brunswick’s city planner Daniel Dominguez said at the meeting.

Large, warehouse-style data centers have become a flash point for many communities across America as Big Tech and other AI companies look to power the large language models and chatbots they say are going to change the world. Those data centers, however, can be a drain on water resources and power grids, increase pollution, and decrease the quality of life.

An investigation by Business Insider published last year found that over 1,200 data centers had been approved for construction across the US by the end of 2024. These data centers, the report found, could consume as much power as entire US states and guzzle enormous amounts of water daily in drought-stricken regions.

In New Brunswick, those environmental concerns were top of mind.

“Community members cited concerns over environmental impact, energy consumption, water usage, noise pollution, and the broader implications of allowing large‐scale artificial intelligence and data infrastructure to expand into residential and public community spaces,” the Climate Revolution Action Network, a local environmental activist group that helped organize opposition to the redevelopment plan, said in a press release.

On Wednesday, residents and environmental advocates attended a New Brunswick City Council meeting to discuss the proposal.

During the meeting, Dominguez said the inclusion of a potential data center in the redevelopment plan was intended to “diversify the commercial development site,” but that it was “not critical to the project.”

Attendees cheered after the city council ultimately voted to nix the data center.

“I’d like to thank the council for deciding to scrap what many people did not want in their neighborhoods,” one attendee said. “We don’t want these kinds of centers in here that are going to take resources from the community.”

New Brunswick is one among many communities across the country fighting potential data center developments.

A large group of residents opposing a proposed data center in Clarmore, Oklahoma, turned out for a council meeting to discuss the project last week. Police arrested one of them for speaking for 30 seconds over their allotted three minutes. In San Marcos, Texas, hundreds of residents showed up at City Hall on Tuesday to protest a data center. The city council eventually scrapped that plan after a nearly 9-hour debate, according to local reports.




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

Anthropic says it will pay 100% of the grid upgrade costs tied to its AI data centers

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Anthropic says it’s going to foot the bill for electricity price increases tied to its data centers.

“We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers,” Anthropic said in a blog post published Wednesday, adding that it will absorb costs that might otherwise be passed on to American households.

Anthropic said it will secure additional power to avoid pushing up electricity prices and invest in “grid optimization tools” designed to reduce strain and keep prices low.

“The country needs to build new data centers quickly to maintain its competitiveness on AI and national security,” Anthropic said. “But AI companies shouldn’t leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab.”

Anthropic’s pledge comes months after the company said it is investing $50 billion in AI infrastructure in the US, beginning with data centers in Texas and New York.

Tech giants are pouring staggering sums into AI infrastructure as they race to expand data center capacity, a buildout that has drawn scrutiny over rising electricity costs.

In November, Meta said it would invest $600 billion in the US “to support AI technology, infrastructure, and workforce expansion.” Apple said in August it would add another $100 billion to its US infrastructure spending, bringing its total investment to $600 billion.

Meanwhile, utility bills are climbing. Electric and gas utilities sought $31 billion in rate increases from state regulators last year, more than double the $15 billion requested the year before, according to a study published last month by PowerLines, a nonprofit that advocates for utility customers. Many utilities have cited power demand from data centers as the key factor for rate increases.

President Donald Trump has urged Big Tech to prevent data centers from pushing up electricity costs.

“I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” Trump wrote last month in a post on Truth Social.

The “big technology companies who build them,” the president said, “must pay their own way.”

Microsoft last month introduced similar measures, saying it would pay utility rates high enough to cover the cost of its data centers’ electricity use and reduce the impact of its data center expansion on local residents.




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Watchdog sounds the alarm that PJM’s approval of data centers could leave other customers in the dark

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The nation’s largest grid operator is facing a choice — between serving more data centers or keeping the lights on for all its existing customers.

In a complaint filed on November 25 with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Monitoring Analytics, LLC, an independent market monitor for PJM, requested that the regulator mandate that the energy wholesaler only add large data centers to its system if all customers can be reliably served.

“PJM is currently proposing to allow the interconnection of large new data center loads that it cannot serve reliably and that will require load curtailments (black outs) of the data centers or of other customers at times,” the complaint read.

“That result is not consistent with the basic responsibility of PJM to maintain a reliable grid and is therefore not just and reasonable,” the complaint added.

PJM serves over 65 million people, including households and other consumers, across all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. While it is not a utility provider, it helps move electricity across a service area of about 369,000 square miles.

According to the complaint, large data centers are responsible for higher transmission costs, as well as energy and capacity prices. Monitoring Analytics added that existing and expected data center loads already increased PJM’s capacity revenues in its last two capacity auctions by $16.6 billion, and the figure would only “continue to grow.”

The complaint also described a “Critical Issues” meeting among PJM’s Board of Managers to address the issue of data centers, but the board ultimately could not come to an agreement since “most stakeholders simply assume that PJM must agree to add large loads to the system.”

The purpose of the complaint, wrote Monitoring Analytics, is to make the board’s job “significantly more manageable” if a regulator could clarify that PJM does have the authority to “require that the loads can be served reliably before allowing the loads to be added to the system.”

A spokesperson of PJM told Business Insider that the company is still “going through the complaint” and would not comment at this time. The spokesperson added that the Board of Managers is “expected to act on the large load issues raised” in the meeting and “should provide an indication of its next steps over the next few weeks.”

Large data centers have been driving up utility costs nationwide, particularly in states like Virginia, where the “data center alley” is located. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation wrote in a November report that data centers are one of the leading causes of a rise in energy demand this winter, which increases the risk of blackouts.

The Trump administration plans to invest $500 billion to build AI infrastructure in collaboration with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in a letter in October that the US should add 100 gigawatts of new power capacity annually to stay competitive in the AI race.




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