TerraFirma has raised roughly $115 million, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, the company said when it announced the financing on July 14. The Austin-based startup, founded in 2024, is betting that the fastest way to fix construction’s labor math is to move skilled operators out of the cab and in front of a screen.
The round drew a deep investor bench alongside Kleiner Perkins, including Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Banner VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital and Ravelin Capital. The company said angel investors included founders, executives and engineers from SpaceX, Anduril, Base Power, Shinkei and Hadrian.
Its two co-founders come from the space world. Chief executive Noah Schochet and chief technology officer Noah McGuinness met at Princeton and worked together at SpaceX on the Starlink, Starshield and Starship programs before starting TerraFirma.
From the cab to the command center
TerraFirma describes itself as a vertically integrated construction company aimed at critical infrastructure, rather than a pure software vendor. Its stack combines AI-enabled preconstruction software, a remote command-and-control center, and retrofitted heavy machinery — excavators, dozers, loaders, rollers and skid steers — that skilled operators run from screens instead of from inside each machine.
The pitch turns on operator leverage. The company says one operator can supervise a small fleet of machines at once — it cites a range of roughly three to five depending on the complexity of the job — and claims the approach makes each operator up to 300% more effective. Those are TerraFirma’s own figures, and the real test will be whether they hold up across the dust, grade changes and unpredictability of live sites.
“Making construction truly faster and cheaper requires innovating on operations and technology together across the full stack,” said McGuinness, the chief technology officer.
Building the crew
TerraFirma says it has already put the system to work on paying jobs. According to the company, those include site preparation for a Starbucks location in north Austin, a sports arena in Spicewood, Texas, a power substation in New Braunfels, Texas, and international infrastructure work for the U.S. government.
The new capital is earmarked for scaling that operation. The company plans to hire around 300 people over the coming year across its engineering, manufacturing, operations and construction teams, and to build out a facility to orchestrate customer machines. It has also made no secret of a longer-range ambition: its footer reads “Texas Born, Mars Bound,” and it frames its Earth-side work as a step toward eventually building on the Moon and Mars — an aspiration, for now, well ahead of the excavators.
Grounded or not, the raise lands in a moment when investors are pouring money into machines that increasingly run themselves. It arrives weeks after autonomy startup Bedrock Robotics closed a $270 million Series B to retrofit earthmoving fleets — a sign that “who operates the machine” is becoming one of construction’s most contested questions. TerraFirma’s answer is a human, just no longer sitting in the dirt.
