This startup just raised $115 million to put robot excavators on building sites

Key points

• TerraFirma raised $115 million in a Series A funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins, in July 2026.
• U.S. construction labour productivity has fallen by an average of 0.6% per year since 1965, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce and Goldman Sachs.
• TerraFirma claims its system can make each equipment operator up to 300% more productive by letting one person control multiple machines remotely.
• The Austin, Texas company was founded in 2024 by two former SpaceX engineers.
• Recent completed projects include site preparation for a Starbucks in North Austin and a power substation in New Braunfels, Texas.

A construction startup founded by two former SpaceX engineers has pulled in $115 million to turn diggers, bulldozers, and rollers into semi-autonomous robots, meaning machines that still rely on a human making decisions but no longer need that human sitting in the cab.

TerraFirma, based in Austin, Texas, announced the funding this week. Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins led the round, joined by Bain Capital Ventures and a string of other investors, as first reported by The Robot Report.

The core idea is straightforward. A skilled equipment operator sits at a bank of screens inside a remote command centre and steers multiple machines at once, rather than climbing into one cab and moving a single digger all day. TerraFirma retrofits standard heavy equipment with cameras, sensors, and software so it can be controlled this way. No science-fiction prototype. Real excavators, real dirt.

Co-founder and CEO Noah Schochet says the industry desperately needs this. Since 1965, U.S. construction productivity has actually declined, falling at roughly 0.6% per year on average. Over the same period, productivity across the broader economy grew at about 1.6% annually. TerraFirma estimates that gap has cost the equivalent of around $1 trillion every five years.

The machines are not fully driverless. That point matters.

"It is not about trying to fully automate construction equipment," said co-founder and chief technology officer Noah McGuinness. Skilled operators still make every meaningful judgement call. The technology simply lets one person's expertise stretch across an entire fleet instead of a single machine.

TerraFirma says that approach can make each operator up to 300% more effective, which means fewer workers needed per project but also safer, better-paid jobs for those who do operate the machines, since they work from a screen rather than inside a vibrating cab on a dusty site.

The company is already working on real projects. Recent Texas jobs include site preparation for a new Starbucks in North Austin, groundwork for a sports arena in Spicewood, and a power substation in New Braunfels. TerraFirma also holds contracts with the U.S. government for infrastructure work in difficult international locations, though it did not name them.

Long-term, the founders have bigger ambitions: the Moon and Mars. The same remote-control construction software, they argue, would transfer directly to off-world building sites where you cannot send a human into a cab at all.

What does this mean for construction workers?

The company is not pitching mass layoffs. Its argument is that one operator controlling four machines earns more than one operator controlling one, and avoids the physical hazards of sitting inside heavy equipment all day. Whether that plays out in practice depends on how quickly the technology spreads and whether contractors pass savings on to workers rather than pocketing them. The $115 million will fund more engineering hires and expanded manufacturing, so the rollout is still early.