Mach9 wants to take the drafting out of survey work. The San Francisco company said Oct. 21 it raised a $34 million Series A for AI CAD software that turns laser scans and survey imagery into first-draft engineering drawings, bringing its total funding to $49 million.
First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners co-led the round, with Prudence and existing investor Quiet Capital joining, according to Mach9’s announcement. The company plans to spend it expanding its surveying and civil engineering software.
How Mach9’s AI CAD software drafts from scans
The founders met at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and started in 2021 as Mach9 Robotics, building inspection hardware. They dropped “Robotics” from the name once they decided the hardware wasn’t the bottleneck. The drafting was.
The software reads 3D reality capture and drafts the features a survey crew would otherwise trace by hand: curbs, signs, poles, lane markings and overhead wires. A surveyor or engineer reviews and finalizes the linework before anything gets stamped. CEO Alex Baikovitz told TechCrunch the manual version takes “about a week per mile” in legacy software.
Mach9 says it’s done more than 2,500 projects in all 50 states, covering over 100,000 miles of infrastructure. Its named engineering customers are WSP, HNTB, NV5 and Pennoni, and the agency list includes Caltrans, Minnesota DOT and the Maryland State Highway Administration. Caltrans has used it to inventory rumble strips and other safety features on Interstate 8 in San Diego. Kier + Wright used it on pedestrian safety work around San Francisco schools, and Fibersmith on a Louisiana broadband buildout reaching 125,000 homes and businesses.
The 10x civil drafting claim needs checking
Here’s the part to read carefully. Mach9 says its drawings come out up to 10 times faster at one-fifth the cost with centimeter-level accuracy. Those numbers are Mach9’s own, and the release doesn’t say what baseline they’re measured against or who checked them.
The strongest evidence is a customer quote. Rob Ashley, HDLS technology director at Pennoni, said the tool lets the firm “do 50% more work with the same experienced team.” That’s a capacity claim, not an accuracy one, and it’s the more believable kind. Survey firms are short on people: Mach9 cites a 24% drop in resident surveying licenses between 2011 and 2025.
The human sign-off matters too. Like Newforma’s pitch for Lumi AI, Mach9 is selling output a licensed professional can check rather than output you’re asked to trust. That’s the right design for anything that ends up in a plan set.
What survey and engineering firms should ask
Ask for side-by-side results on a corridor you’ve already drafted by hand. Ask how often reviewers correct the AI linework, and on which feature types. Reality capture is getting cheaper every year, as tools like CupixWorks 5.0 show. The firms that win will be the ones that turn point clouds into checked drawings fastest, and $34 million says investors think the drafting step is where that race gets decided.