Mach9, the San Francisco startup building AI CAD software for civil engineering, said on Wednesday it has raised a $34 million Series A round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company’s own announcement, published through PR Newswire on October 21, puts its total funding at $49 million, with Prudence joining the round and existing investor Quiet Capital taking part again.
The raise caps a sharp change of direction. Mach9 began life in 2021 as Mach9 Robotics, building hardware to make visual inspections faster and cheaper for civil engineers, before concluding that the hardware was not the bottleneck and pivoting to software that turns scan data into engineering drawings.
What Mach9’s Software Actually Does
Mach9’s platform takes reality-capture data — the 3D scans and LiDAR surveys that engineering teams collect with equipment they already own — and automatically drafts the physical features in them: curbs, signs, poles, lane markings and wires, at what the company describes as centimeter-level accuracy. Surveyors and engineers then review, refine and finalize the drawings in Mach9’s editing tools.
The company says the automation produces drawings up to 10 times faster and at one-fifth the cost of manual drafting. Founder and chief executive Alex Baikovitz told TechCrunch that turning scanner output into a usable survey is among the slowest, most labor-intensive stages of the construction pipeline, with manual work in incumbent tools from the likes of Autodesk and Bentley Systems taking roughly a week per mile.
The Traction Behind The Round
Mach9 says engineering teams have now used its software across more than 2,500 projects in all 50 US states, surveying over 100,000 miles of infrastructure corridors. Its named customers include the engineering firms WSP, HNTB and NV5, and transport agencies including Caltrans, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration.
The announcement gives three working examples. Caltrans is using Mach9 on Interstate 8 in San Diego to inventory rumble strips and other road-safety features; Kier + Wright is using it in San Francisco to improve pedestrian safety around schools; and Fibersmith is using it in Louisiana to help connect 125,000 homes and businesses that lacked high-speed internet. Pennoni’s HDLS technology director Rob Ashley said the software lets his firm do 50% more work with the same experienced team.
Why It Matters
Mach9’s raise matters because the constraint it attacks is people, not data. Scanners can now capture miles of roadway in a day, but the supply of licensed surveyors is shrinking — Mach9’s announcement cites a 24% fall in resident surveying licenses between 2011 and 2025 — while the stock of roads, poles and power lines designed for a 50-year life is now around 70 years old. A tool that converts raw scans into draft drawings shifts scarce engineers from drafting to judgment, which is why investors who backed construction software before, including Bessemer’s team behind Procore, are paying for the category. For incumbent CAD vendors, the round is another signal that AI drafting is moving from experiment to procurement line item.
Background
Mach9 was founded by Alex Baikovitz, Haowen Shi, Michael Mong and Zach Sussman, who met at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and previously built perception and navigation systems at Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, NASA and Google X. The company spent its first years on inspection hardware before dropping “Robotics” from its name and rebuilding around AI CAD — the pivot this Series A now funds at scale. Related coverage: Eka Robotics’ $150 million Series A for physical AI, Daytona’s $60 million Series B for its agent cloud and Pigment’s $250 million Series E.
Source: Mach9’s Series A announcement via PR Newswire, TechCrunch
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