From Robotics to AI CAD: A Strategic Pivot
When Alex Baikovitz co-founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021, his goal was to build a faster, cheaper, and better way for civil engineers to conduct visual inspections. The company set out to cut through red tape and modernize the slow, outdated processes that bog down construction in the United States.
Within a few years, Mach9 Robotics had built that hardware—but the effort led Baikovitz to a realization: hardware wasn't 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 told TechCrunch, referring to the detailed site maps 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."
So Baikovitz dropped "Robotics" from the company's name and pivoted to developing AI-powered computer-aided design (CAD) software instead. The bet paid off: Mach9 has attracted nearly 100 customers to the private beta of its software, who have used it on more than 2,500 projects to date.
$34M Series A to Accelerate Growth
That momentum helped Mach9 unlock new funding. On Wednesday, the startup announced a $34 million Series A round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Also participating were Prudence, an early-stage New York-based firm focused on AI software use cases for construction and real estate, and Quiet Capital, an existing investor.
Mach9 is one of several 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." Meanwhile, Blueprints AI—which uses AI to produce code-compliant, permit-ready architectural blueprints in minutes—was among the top 200 companies in the Startup Battlefield competition at last week's TechCrunch Disrupt.
Disrupting Legacy CAD Workflows
Baikovitz said Mach9 is focused on disrupting CAD software because it's one of the slowest and most labor-intensive pieces of the 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 much 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 own capacity and take on more types of work, bigger projects, and expand the reach of how reality-capture data can influence major infrastructure decisions," Baikovitz said.
Purpose-Built AI Models for Survey-Grade Accuracy
Baikovitz said Mach9 developed and trained its own in-house AI models to reach the centimeter-accurate level that construction and infrastructure work requires.
"That's not something that a lot of off-the-shelf models are able to do or deliver at in any capacity," he said. "A big part of what our development process has looked like since 2024 has been, how do we build the industry-leading models that can turn imagery or these multimodal image and laser scan datasets into survey-grade geometry—like tracing out the curbs, the pavement striping, all of this exactly how our customers want it to be at the accuracies that the industry demands."