The hard part of construction automation was never the software. It’s the machine. TerraFirma, an Austin startup founded by two former SpaceX engineers, says it has a way around that problem, and investors just handed it about $115 million to prove the point.
The round, announced July 14, includes a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. Rather than build a robot from scratch, TerraFirma retrofits the excavators, dozers, loaders, rollers and skid steers already on the market, stripping the operator out of the cab and running the machine from a remote command center.
A contractor that happens to build robots
What makes the company unusual is that it doesn’t just sell hardware. TerraFirma operates as both a technology developer and a construction contractor, deploying its converted machines on jobs alongside its own pre-construction planning software. That structure lets it capture the work, not just the tool, which is a very different business than selling a $2 million robot and walking away.
Founders Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness started the firm in 2024. The pitch leans on the same logic that reshaped aerospace: take a hard physical problem, control the whole stack, and iterate fast. The new capital is earmarked for hiring about 300 people, building a factory, and standing up the remote mission-control operation that pilots the fleet.
Why retrofits, not new machines
Full autonomy on a jobsite is still years out, and everyone in the space knows it. Dirt work is messy, GPS drops out, and the ground changes by the hour. Remote operation is the honest near-term version: a skilled operator runs several machines from a chair instead of one from a seat, which stretches a labor pool that 92% of contractors say they can’t fill.
Retrofitting also sidesteps the capital wall. Contractors already own the iron. Converting existing machines is cheaper than replacing a fleet, and it keeps resale value intact. That matters for the earthmoving side of highway work, where margins are thin and equipment is the biggest line on the balance sheet. Projects like the 2100 North freeway build in Lehi, Utah run months of mass grading that remote-operated dozers could, in theory, keep moving through a night shift.
The catch
Remote operation isn’t free of people. It moves them off the machine and into a room, which changes the safety math and the union conversation more than the marketing lets on. And a contractor-plus-technology model competes with its own customers, a tension TerraFirma will have to manage as it scales. For now, the money says the retrofit path is the one worth betting on.