On Wednesday, Mach9 announced a $34 million Series A funding round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, following a pivot from hardware to AI-powered computer-aided design (CAD) software. Additional participation in the round came from Prudence and Quiet Capital.
When Alex Baikovitz co-founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021, his goal was to build a better, faster, and cheaper way for civil engineers to do visual inspections. Within a few years, the company built the hardware, but Baikovitz realized hardware was not the bottleneck.
“We saw how tedious it was for civil engineering organizations to take data from these amazing laser scanners and image data capture systems and turn that into a usable survey,” he said in an interview, referring to a detailed map of a site that engineers use for design work. “The real pain was in their workflows,” he said, and “how to turn all the endless amounts of data that they’re able to collect into . . . information that people can use to make the best design and asset management decisions across the board.”
Baikovitz dropped “Robotics” from the company’s name and pivoted to developing AI-powered CAD software. The startup has racked up nearly 100 customers for the private beta of its software, and they have used it on more than 2,500 projects to date.
Mach9 is one of a number of startups racing to modernize the planning-to-building pipeline for construction and infrastructure. In August, CivilGrid raised $26 million to grow what it calls the “Google Maps for the underground,” while Blueprints AI used AI to produce code-compliant, permit-ready architectural blueprints.
Baikovitz said Mach9 is focused on disrupting CAD software because it is one of the slowest and most labor-intensive pieces of that overall pipeline.
“It takes months to be able to deliver a project, and about a week per mile for someone to do manually in the legacy incumbent software that’s built by the Autodesk and Bentley Systems of the world,” he said.
Mach9 says its software automates a lot of that work, making the process 10 times faster and dramatically reducing costs. This allows customers doing surveying and civil engineering work to expand their capacity and take on larger projects.
Baikovitz said Mach9 developed and trained its own in-house AI models to reach the centimeter-accurate level that construction and infrastructure work requires. A big part of the development process since 2024 has focused on building industry-leading models that turn imagery and laser scan data sets into survey-grade geometry.
The AI CAD system takes survey data and creates a first draft of a plan for engineers to refine. The startup provides tools to draw, remove, adjust vertices, and assess model quality before licensed professionals put their name behind the deliverable.
The startup will split the new funding between improving the product, hiring industry experts, and scaling all parts of the organization.
Reflecting on the hardware path, Baikovitz said it gave the startup something to pitch to potential customers, who ultimately told him they needed better software to improve efficiency in delivering statewide transportation mapping initiatives in states like Texas.
