Ex-SpaceX engineers raise $115 million to turn excavators into robots
Agentic AI is leaving the browser for the job site. The company is selling autonomous robot crews as a service, with the data-center boom as an obvious customer.
- TerraFirma raised $115 million, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, to combine AI pre-construction software, a remote command center, and retrofitted semi-autonomous heavy machinery.
- The Austin company was founded in 2024 by former SpaceX engineers who worked on Starlink, Starshield, and Starship; the machinery operates without a human in the cab.
- Cited commercial projects include site prep for a new Austin Starbucks, a sports arena, and a power substation; the company claims each operator becomes up to 300 percent more effective.
Agentic AI spent the year automating knowledge work. This raise points it at dirt. TerraFirma announced $115 million in funding, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, CNBC reported, to turn heavy construction machinery into remotely operated, semi-autonomous robots.
Excavators without a cab
The Austin company, founded in 2024 by former SpaceX engineers Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness, who worked on Starlink, Starshield, and Starship, combines AI-enabled pre-construction software, a remote command-and-control center, and retrofitted excavators, dozers, loaders, and rollers that run without a human in the cab, per the company's release. Remote operators drive the machines through a mix of interfaces including Xbox controllers, and the company claims the system makes each operator up to 300 percent more effective, a figure to read as a company claim. Backers beyond Kleiner Perkins include Bain Capital Ventures, PEAK6, and Magnetar. Cited projects include site prep for a new Austin Starbucks, a sports arena, and a power substation, with an eventual stated ambition of construction on Mars.
The demand driver is the other half of the story
An autonomous robot crew sold as a service has an obvious customer right now: the data-center buildout that every capacity story on this beat depends on. The same week TerraFirma raised, New York froze new hyperscale permits and Reflection prepaid a billion dollars of compute, which is the demand and the friction in one frame. It also extends the pattern this beat keeps logging, that investors are funding agents to take over specific human roles, from the forward deployed engineer to the equipment operator, and pricing each takeover in the hundreds of millions.