How Former Fencing Champion Dila Ekrem is Revamping Contract Management in the Construction Industry

Arctis AI, the contract operating system for construction professionals, turning complex documents into clarity, alignment, and control, led by Leon Stawowiak, Duc-Trung Nguyen, Dila Ekrem, and Simon Paul, has raised $1M+ led by PT1 (Berlin/London), with participation from EWOR, and a prominent group of angels, including Alexander Schwörer (Owner of PERI), Sebastian Johnston (Founding Partner at La Famiglia), Christian Vollmann (Founder of C1 Green Chemicals), Daniel Bronk (Founder of B+V Union & Real Estate Developer), Christian Marquart (Director Legal at Marvel Fusion).

Europe’s construction and real estate sector, the largest industry in the region, still relies heavily on manual, fragmented workflows. This inefficiency is becoming a bottleneck as massive infrastructure investments accelerate, with €584B needed for power grid upgrades and €500B for transport modernisation by 2030. Growing project scale and complexity are overwhelming traditional administrative systems.

Arctis AI is building AI agents that turn construction contracts into structured, actionable systems. Instead of static PDFs, contracts become a central operating hub where obligations, risks, payments, and dependencies are transparent and usable by commercial and project teams throughout the project lifecycle.

Construction workflows are fragmented and document-heavy, spanning tendering, contracts, change orders, and claims. The sector remains highly traditional and inefficient. Arctis AI aims to build an end-to-end AI platform for contractors and developers, embedding AI into daily workflows to run projects faster, more accurately, and at lower cost.

Arctis AI digitizes and connects the administrative workflows of large construction and infrastructure projects. By replacing fragmented documents with unified workflows, the platform helps teams align faster, reduce friction, and ensure consistency from tender to project close-out. It targets the industry’s biggest administrative bottlenecks, enabling contractors and developers to deliver complex projects with greater precision and lower operational overhead.

Ekrem transitioned from elite fencing to entrepreneurship. She ranked #1 in Turkey and won 35+ medals before moving to Germany to study at TUM. Growing up in her father’s custom shirt business inspired her to build her own company, and she later entered Munich’s startup ecosystem to pursue that path.

Ekrem co-founded Arctis AI with TUM classmates Duc-Trung Nguyen and Leon Stawowiak. Nguyen supported his computer science studies as a delivery driver before becoming an AI engineer at SAP, while Stawowiak previously worked on AI projects at Bain and KPMG. The team conducted extensive market research with over 150 contract managers, identified key pain points, and launched Arctis AI in August 2025, deploying its first pilot in Germany within three months.

Ekrem highlighted that winning early pilots in construction required trust and relationships. Warm introductions and credible references helped secure initial calls, after which the team demonstrated clear industry pain points and technical capability. Arctis AI invested heavily in hands-on onboarding, sometimes spending a full day with clients, since many users were unfamiliar with modern software beyond SAP. After one to two weeks, the product became intuitive and largely self-explanatory.

Ekrem said most contract tools treat documents as isolated files, which fails in construction, where every agreement depends on others. Arctis is building AI agents that understand these interdependencies, letting teams interact with all project contracts as a connected system and gain a holistic view of obligations and risks. The platform starts with pre-signature workflows and turns historical and active contracts into a reusable knowledge base, preserving institutional knowledge that would otherwise be lost when teams change.

The round was led by PT1 with participation from EWOR, Superangels, and industry angels from construction and tech. Ekrem’s fundraising began via UnternehmerTUM and involved ~150 investor calls, with a deliberate focus on sector-specific investors who could drive credibility and customer access. PT1 and construction-focused angels were chosen for their industry connections. With the new capital, Arctis AI is hiring senior engineers, building new product modules, and expanding its European customer base.