When Mach9 co-founder Alex Baikovitz founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021, his goal was to create a better, faster, and more cost-effective visual inspection solution for civil engineers. The company aimed to bypass cumbersome processes and modernize the slow, outdated workflows in the U.S. construction industry.
Several years later, Mach9 Robotics had developed that hardware, but the experience made Baikovitz realize that the bottleneck wasn’t in the hardware.
“We saw how cumbersome it was for civil engineering firms to turn the data collected from these great laser scanners and image capture systems into usable surveying results,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the detailed maps engineers use for design work. “The real pain point is their workflow,” he said, “and how to transform the vast amounts of data they can collect into information that people can use to make optimal design and asset management decisions.”
Thus, Baikovitz removed “Robotics” from the company name and shifted to developing AI-driven computer-aided design (CAD) software. This bet paid off: Mach9’s private beta software has amassed nearly 100 customers and has been used in over 2,500 projects to date.
This momentum helped Mach9 secure new funding. On Wednesday, the startup announced the completion of a $34 million Series A round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Other participants included Prudence, a New York-based early-stage fund focused on AI software applications in construction and real estate, as well as existing investor Quiet Capital.
Mach9 is one of a group of startups racing to modernize the "from planning to construction" process for buildings and infrastructure. In August, another startup called CivilGrid raised $26 million to expand its so-called "Google Maps for underground infrastructure." Meanwhile, Blueprints AI uses AI to generate code-compliant, permit-ready architectural blueprints in minutes, and last week it was named among the top 200 companies in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield competition.
Baikovitz said Mach9 focuses on disrupting CAD software because it is one of the slowest and most labor-intensive parts of the entire process.
Completing a project often takes months, and in traditional legacy software developed by companies like Autodesk and Bentley Systems, manual processing takes about one week per mile, he said.
Mach9 stated that its software automates a large volume of work, making processes 10 times faster and significantly reducing costs. This enables customers in surveying and civil engineering to “scale their capacity, take on more types of work and larger projects, and expand the impact of reality capture data on critical infrastructure decisions,” said Baikovitz.
Baikovitz said Mach9 developed and trained its own internal AI model to achieve centimeter-level accuracy required for construction and infrastructure work.
“This is something that very few off-the-shelf models can achieve or provide at any level,” he said. “Since 2024, a significant part of our development process has focused on building industry-leading models that convert images or these multimodal image and LiDAR datasets into survey-grade geometry—such as delineating curbs, road markings, and all such elements—with precision fully meeting customer requirements and industry standards.”
Mach9’s AI CAD system first generates an initial draft based on survey data, which engineers then refine. Baikovitz said the startup “provides them with all the tools to draw, delete, and adjust vertices, and to evaluate the quality of the AI-generated models, so they can truly take ownership of the deliverables under their own name—since this industry involves significant liability risks and requires licensed professionals who truly understand what they’re seeing.”
Regarding this funding, Baikovitz said the company will allocate the funds toward product improvements, hiring industry experts, and expanding "various parts of our organization to keep pace with the direction the market is taking us."
Looking back, Baikovitz says he’s glad he initially took the hardware route, as it gave the company something tangible to show potential customers—customers who then told him they didn’t need better data collection devices.
“I’m not interested in cheaper, lower-cost hardware,” he recalled a vice president telling him. But better software could “increase our efficiency in delivering these large-scale state transportation mapping projects,” he said. He added that such projects help states that have worked with Mach9, like Texas, become “safer and more efficient.”