When a refrigerator dies under a home warranty, fixing it looks simple from the outside. Behind that repair though is a chain of phone calls, spreadsheets, and judgment calls that most of the industry still handles by hand.
Today Polygrade comes out of stealth with $6.3 million in funding to change how that work gets done. Construct led the round, and we're glad to back David Steckel, Eui Chung, and Kaustubh Vongole alongside AmFam Ventures and Nine Four Ventures.
Warranties sit behind a remarkable share of what Americans buy. Consumers spent about $2.27 trillion on durable goods in 2025, and almost all of it comes with some kind of warranty. US-based manufacturers alone paid $30.4 billion in warranty claims last year. That doesn’t include extended and home warranties. Property and casualty insurers are moving into the same territory; most home insurers now sell equipment breakdown coverage, which pays to repair HVAC systems and appliances when they fail. Whatever the warranty, the work behind a claim is largely the same: figure out what’s wrong, determine what’s covered, get it fixed, and pay for it.
Handling those claims is still mostly manual work. A single home warranty claim can involve the homeowner, the warranty company, a contractor, several parts suppliers, and the manufacturer. A claims agent usually sits in the middle, moving between systems, making calls and reviewing invoices line by line. At Construct, we look for Foundational Industries where legacy systems and manual work still sit at the center of how things get done. In warranty claims, we believe agentic AI can change that. Polygrade uses task-specific AI agents across the whole claim, from first notice of loss through triage, authorization, parts procurement, and contractor payment. The agents work within each warranty company's own rules and pass exceptions to a person.
Property and casualty insurance has Guidewire. Warranty never got an equivalent core platform. Most warranty companies run on systems built to log and route claims, not to decide them. That creates an opening for AI to do more than sit alongside the workflow. Polygrade runs on top of existing systems instead of replacing them, so warranty companies including Cinch, Fidelity, Elevate, and United don't have to go through a multi-year migration to see results.
Claims are messy by nature. Coverage differs from contract to contract. Whether to repair or replace can depend on whether a part is weeks away. A call made at triage affects what gets paid at the end. Building for that complexity requires knowing how the operation actually works. That was a big part of what drew us to David, Eui, and KV. David Steckel founded Setter, a home management platform that Thumbtack acquired, and later helped build Thumbtack's home services partnerships before becoming Chief Product Officer at Sears Home Services. Eui Chung spent nearly 30 years at Sears and Transformco, most recently leading Sears Home Services' AI transformation. Kaustubh “KV” Vongole led fulfillment products and AI strategy across Sears Home Services' network of more than 2,500 technicians. Between them, they’ve worked across nearly every part of the operation Polygrade is now building for. They know where time and money get lost and why earlier software didn't fix it.
Polygrade is starting with home warranty, but we don't think the opportunity stops there. The same operational complexity exists across extended and OEM warranties and equipment breakdown coverage — anywhere a claim ultimately ends with something physical that needs to be repaired or replaced. We're looking forward to building with David, Eui, and KV as they go after all of it.