TerraFirma raises $100M Series A to build robotic construction crews

Why it matters

TerraFirma is trying to own both the construction job and the robotics stack, giving its engineers live project data and direct exposure to jobsite economics.

Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness's TerraFirma raised approximately $115 million, including a $100 million Series A, to expand a contractor that builds and operates its own robotic heavy-equipment stack.

The Austin-based company announced the financing on July 14th. Kleiner Perkins led the Series A, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital and Ravelin Capital. TerraFirma also said angel investors include founders, executives and engineers from SpaceX, Anduril, Base Power, Shinkei and Hadrian.

TerraFirma did not disclose its valuation, revenue, contract values, current machine count or the composition of the additional roughly $15 million outside the Series A. The scale of the round, however, puts real capital behind a strategy that most construction-robotics companies have struggled to execute: turning field deployment into the product loop rather than waiting for contractors or equipment manufacturers to adopt the technology at their own pace.

Schochet, TerraFirma's CEO, and McGuinness, TerraFirma's CTO, met at Princeton before working at SpaceX on programs including Starlink, Starshield and Starship, according to TerraFirma. TerraFirma says that background shaped its operating model: hardware, software and field operations developed together, with engineers close enough to the worksite to see what actually fails, slows down or gets ignored when machinery hits dirt.

TerraFirma's system combines AI-enabled pre-construction software, a remote command-and-control center and retrofitted heavy machinery, including excavators, dozers, loaders, rollers and skid steers. TerraFirma says the machines can be remotely operated or run semi-autonomously, with skilled operators supervising equipment from screens rather than sitting in cabs.

The autonomy claim is deliberately bounded. McGuinness said in TerraFirma's announcement that "autonomy is a part of the solution," while stressing that the company is also changing operations. That distinction matters in construction, where fully autonomous equipment has to work around uneven terrain, unstructured sites, changing crews, weather, safety constraints and project schedules that rarely look like a clean robotics demo.

TerraFirma says one operator can become up to 300% more effective by supervising multiple machines. TerraFirma did not publish the benchmark, task mix, number of machines, utilization rate or baseline behind that figure, so the number should be treated as a company performance claim rather than an independently verified productivity gain.

The immediate business is earthworks and site operations. TerraFirma's own site lists "Mission Planner" for bidding, planning, simulation and execution; "Mission Control" for remote coordination; and retrofitted machinery for accelerated operations. TerraFirma says it performs mass excavation, land clearing, foundations, grading, grubbing and site demolition in Texas, using excavators, bulldozers, skid steers, loaders, graders and rollers.

TerraFirma says its technology is already deployed across multiple jobsites. Publicly listed work on TerraFirma's site includes site excavation for a new Starbucks in North Austin in 2025, site preparation and building pads for a Zachary Cole Foundation retreat center in Taylor, Texas, and demolition and grading work for a two-story building in Austin. In the financing announcement, TerraFirma also said recent commercial work included a sports arena in Spicewood and a power substation in New Braunfels.

TerraFirma also said it is working with the U.S. government on mission-critical international infrastructure and logistics projects. TerraFirma did not name the agency, program, geography or contract value.

That mix explains the round better than the Mars language around TerraFirma's brand. The near-term market is housing, energy, transportation, manufacturing and education infrastructure, where earthmoving remains labor-intensive and schedule-sensitive. The longer-term asset, if TerraFirma can keep operating jobsites directly, is data: machine telemetry, operator interventions, soil conditions, work sequencing, planning errors, job-cost outcomes and safety events across real construction projects.

Construction has become a favored target for robotics investors because the productivity case is unusually stark. Goldman Sachs wrote earlier this year that labor productivity in U.S. construction has fallen at an average pace of 0.6% per year since 1965, while productivity across the wider economy has grown about 1.6% annually. The Bureau of Labor Statistics separately noted that construction productivity declined every year from 2021 through 2024 across the industries it measures.

TerraFirma is entering a field that already includes companies such as Built Robotics, which sells autonomous systems for construction equipment, and Teleo, which retrofits heavy machinery for remote and supervised autonomous operation. TerraFirma's sharper bet is vertical integration: TerraFirma is operating as a contractor, not only as a technology vendor. That gives TerraFirma more control over deployment, training, job selection and feedback from the field, while also exposing TerraFirma to the lower-margin, execution-heavy realities of construction work.

TerraFirma was founded in 2024, according to the announcement, and is based in Austin. The Austin Business Journal reported in May that TerraFirma was nearing the opening of a new headquarters in Buda, south of Austin, and described the move as a step up for Schochet and McGuinness after early work tied to a testing site known as Robot Ranch.

Schochet's pitch ties the earthbound business to a much larger ambition. "Construction is the foundation everything else is built on," he said in the announcement. TerraFirma's own site makes the SpaceX lineage explicit: "At SpaceX, we built the rockets to reach Mars. Now, we're focused on the payload."

Investors are underwriting the earthworks first. The capital will go toward TerraFirma's engineering, manufacturing, operations and construction teams, along with further development of its semi-autonomous heavy-equipment systems. The open question is whether TerraFirma can turn a handful of Texas and government projects into a repeatable operating model that improves margins on actual construction work, where delays and exceptions are the norm.