Sacra estimates that Shovels hit $3M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in August 2026, up from $1.5M at the end of 2025.

Shovels ended 2023 at roughly $40K in ARR. Founder Ryan Buckley disclosed about $6K ARR in August 2023, when the company was launching its nationwide permit API. MRR increased through 2024 as Shovels added its first enterprise contracts, reaching about $8K MRR in March 2024 and roughly $40K in subscription revenue in October 2024. ARR reached $500K at the end of 2024.

Growth accelerated in 2025 as Fortune 500 telecom, technology, and homebuilding customers signed enterprise data licenses and large geospatial contracts. MRR reached $80K in April 2025, and the company crossed $1M ARR in May 2025. In November 2025, MRR had tripled year over year, and Shovels closed the year at $1.5M ARR.

In 2026, Shovels expanded its data coverage, launched its Decisions API, and grew its enterprise sales team. MRR reached $250K in August 2026, equivalent to $3M ARR.

Shovels sells recurring access to cleaned and enriched public-government data covering building permits, contractors, properties, and local development decisions. Revenue comes from monthly Online and API subscriptions, usage-based record credits, and larger custom Enterprise Data Licenses delivered through Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery. Customers use the data for construction lead generation, contractor intelligence, market analysis, verification, and embedded product integrations.

Shovels raised a $5M seed round led by Base10 Partners in June 2025, bringing total reported funding to $6.5M. Shovels allocated the round to hiring, AI infrastructure, additional jurisdiction coverage and government datasets, and platform tooling.

Before the seed round, Shovels had raised approximately $1.5M. Coelius Capital led the initial round, with participation from Founders Network Fund and Mission One Capital.

Shovels standardizes fragmented local-government records covering building permits, contractors, properties, and local development decisions across the United States. As of mid-2026, the platform contains more than 178 million building permits from over 2,770 jurisdictions, covering roughly 85% of the U.S. population, and approximately 3.65 million contractor profiles.

There is no national permit system, and more than 20,000 U.S. jurisdictions use different portals, field names, permit taxonomies, address formats, and update schedules. One city might label an HVAC installation as a mechanical permit, another as a residential alteration, and a third might use free text such as "replace furnace." Shovels maps these records into a common schema, uses AI models to classify the work, resolves contractor and property entities across inconsistent spellings and formats, and enriches records with contacts, license data, property characteristics, and geographic identifiers.

Shovels Online is a no-code web app for filtering records by geography, permit type, date range, contractor specialty, or property characteristics. Users can view results on a map or in a table, trace relationships among permits, contractors, and properties, and export up to 1,000 records to CSV. Charlie, its built-in AI agent, accepts plain-English queries for activity that may not map cleanly to a single permit category. Developers and product teams can access the same data through a REST API and CLI, with credits consumed per record returned rather than per API call. ArcGIS and QGIS integrations serve spatial workflows for utilities, planners, and telecom teams.

Enterprise Data Licenses deliver the complete dataset to a customer's Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks environment as roughly 15-20 GB of Parquet tables, refreshed twice monthly. Customers use the licenses for nationwide analysis, internal model training, property scoring, and embedding Shovels data in their own infrastructure.

In January 2026, Shovels acquired ReZone and launched its Decisions dataset, which structures local-government agendas, meeting minutes, and transcripts covering rezoning applications, planning commission actions, variances, demolition approvals, and development agreements. By June 2026, Decisions covered more than 600 cities and nearly 200,000 records. These records provide earlier signals than building permits: a rezoning application or planning-commission vote can surface a project months before architects, equipment, and financing are locked in.

Shovels uses a B2B data-as-a-service model combining software subscriptions, usage-based consumption, and enterprise licensing. Self-serve plans start at $599/month for Basic and $999/month for Pro, with monthly credit pools shared across the web app, API, CLI, and AI agent. One credit equals one normalized record retrieved or exported. Enterprise and Enterprise Data License contracts are custom-priced based on datasets, geographic scope, delivery method, seats, and redistribution rights.

The tiered structure monetizes the same data across different customer profiles. A free tier with 500 monthly credits and one year of history functions as a product sample and developer acquisition channel, while paid self-serve plans cover individual prospecting and small-team workflows. Enterprise data licenses deliver complete tables into customer warehouses, generate materially higher annual contract values, and become part of underwriting, infrastructure planning, and product pipelines, increasing switching costs.

Shovels' cost structure resembles data-heavy SaaS rather than pure software. The company maintains thousands of jurisdiction-specific data connectors, runs LLM inference for classification and entity resolution, employs construction-domain quality assurance, and monitors government portals that can change without warning. Its 2025–2026 transition to fully first-party data collection removed upstream licensing fees, giving Shovels more control over long-run gross margins while moving responsibility for collection reliability and portal maintenance in-house.

Go-to-market combines product-led self-serve and content-driven inbound with an enterprise sales team led by a VP of Sales hired from ATTOM Data. Partnerships with Esri, Precisely, Cherre, Regrid, and Clay distribute Shovels data through existing geospatial, property, and go-to-market workflows. Cross-dataset expansion links permits to contractors and addresses, contractor licenses to enriched profiles, property records to normalized parcels and ownership, and decisions to planned projects before permits are filed, increasing the utility of each dataset as the others expand.

Shovels competes across a fragmented market that includes permit-data specialists, property-data incumbents, construction-project intelligence platforms, and the government software vendors that operate the systems where permit records originate.

BuildZoom is the closest direct competitor. It reports more than 326 million permits, three decades of history, and 85% national coverage, with a proprietary matching system that links permits, properties, and contractors. BuildZoom also operates a consumer contractor marketplace that generates reviews, project outcomes, and responsiveness signals unavailable in public records. Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) distributes its data into insurance, lending, and appraisal workflows.

Shovels is more neutral and programmable. Rather than broker homeowner-contractor transactions, it sells standardized data through an API, CLI, warehouse delivery, and AI agent. This model targets software developers and data teams seeking composable infrastructure rather than a marketplace's scoring logic.

Construction Monitor competes more directly on permit-triggered sales leads, with daily updates, human-curated construction types, and more than 30 years of industry relationships with building-product manufacturers and regional sales organizations. Shovels offers a modern API, richer cross-entity joins, cloud-native delivery, and upstream coverage of planning and zoning decisions.

Cotality and ATTOM compete through vertical breadth rather than permit-only products. Cotality maps permits to its persistent property identifier and bundles them with assessor data, parcels, climate hazards, and valuations across all major cloud platforms. ATTOM includes permits in an API covering more than 160 million U.S. properties, joined to ownership, transaction, and assessment data.

These incumbents have established procurement relationships with insurers, lenders, and telecom companies. Their competitive advantage is not necessarily a better standalone permit interface, but the ability to bundle permits at a lower incremental price within a larger property-data contract. Shovels focuses more narrowly on permits and contractors, including contractor service areas, work history, and market activity, which property-centric platforms handle less directly.

RealPage represents the broader advantage of entrenched property systems of record. Embedded records and workflows create switching costs and give incumbents access to data that pure aggregators cannot easily replicate.

PermitFlow, GreenLite, Accela, OpenGov, and Tyler Technologies operate the software where permit records originate. PermitFlow's AI agents manage research, submission, and municipal coordination across more than 7,000 jurisdictions, generating proprietary operational data, including reviewer comments, resubmission cycles, and actual approval times, that issued-permit records do not contain.

OpenGov serves approximately 2,000 governments and has introduced APIs that expose records, inspections, fees, and contacts. If these vendors commercialize cross-jurisdiction data or restrict automated access while charging for authorized feeds, they could become both upstream dependencies and direct competitors.

Shovels' multi-vendor normalization retains value because no single govtech platform controls every jurisdiction. However, greater API standardization among source-system vendors could reduce competitors' collection costs and allow those vendors to capture more downstream data value.

Shovels is expanding from a permit database into a horizontal public-data intelligence platform for the built environment, with opportunities across new data products, customer segments, and geographic coverage.

The ReZone acquisition and Decisions API move Shovels upstream, from recording construction after a permit is filed to identifying projects during rezoning, environmental review, and planning-commission approval. This expands the addressable market from retrospective construction data to development origination and early-warning intelligence.

Adjacent data categories could include inspections, certificates of occupancy, code enforcement, utility interconnection queues, liens, and capital-improvement plans. Each uses the same model: collect a difficult public dataset, normalize it into structured objects, link it to existing Shovels entities through shared addresses and parcels, and make it available through existing interfaces.

Shovels classifies permits into categories such as solar, EV charging, battery storage, roofing, HVAC, ADUs, and telecom. Packaging these classifications into vertical products, rather than requiring each customer to interpret raw permits, expands the potential customer base to insurance, utilities, telecommunications, building materials, financial services, and home services.

Electrification is creating property-level load changes that utilities must anticipate, while AI infrastructure is increasing demand for early data-center site intelligence. Housing shortages raise the value of entitlement and zoning data, and climate exposure increases insurer and lender demand for renovation and roof-age signals. These trends increase the commercial value of normalized municipal records.

Shovels currently covers roughly 2,770 of more than 20,000 U.S. permitting jurisdictions. Increasing domestic coverage in rural areas, smaller municipalities, and historically weak states would make the platform more useful to national insurers, utilities, and home-service marketplaces that need consistent coverage across a service territory.

The company is also moving from developer-first adoption toward broader enterprise penetration. A telecom company might initially buy permits for competitive monitoring, then add decisions for early infrastructure signals, properties for address context, and warehouse feeds for planning. Partnerships with Esri, Precisely, and Regrid place Shovels data inside existing geospatial and property workflows, extending distribution to software companies that cannot justify maintaining thousands of jurisdiction-specific collectors themselves.

Coverage instability: Shovels depends on thousands of municipal portals whose schemas, availability, and publication practices can change without warning, and when it removed third-party licensed data in 2026 to gain full control of its collection pipeline, its permit count dropped from over 200 million to roughly 178 million, indicating that coverage improvements and data-quality transitions can create breaking changes for customers relying on geographic completeness.

Enterprise concentration: With an estimated customer base still numbering in the dozens and Fortune 500 data licenses likely representing a meaningful share of ARR, the loss or non-renewal of a small number of large contracts could materially affect revenue while the company has limited capacity to absorb the shortfall.

Public-data replicability: The raw government records Shovels collects are generally not exclusive, and as AI-assisted scraping and open-data APIs reduce the cost of basic municipal permit aggregation, Shovels must differentiate through operational execution in entity resolution, historical normalization, cross-dataset linkage, recency, and customer embedding rather than proprietary ownership of the underlying government facts.