Alex Baikovitz co-founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021. His main reason behind setting up the startup was to build a better, faster, and cheaper way for civil engineers to handle visual inspections. The idea behind this startup was cutting through red tape and modernize the slow, outdated processes bogging down construction in USA.
It didn’t take long for the startup to build the hardware. But this action led to the realization that hardware wasn’t the bottleneck as per Baikovitz.
“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.” For this reason, they decided to drop ‘Robotics’ from the company’s name.
Instead, they pivoted to developing AI-powered computer-aided design (CAD) software. And this wasn’t in vain since Mach9 went on to rack up nearly 100 customers for the private beta of its software. And the best part is that they have used it on more than 2,500 projects to date.
Mach9 announced a $34 million Series A funding round on Wednesday co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Also throwing in were Prudence. Just as a quick reminder, Prudence is an early-stage, New York-based firm focusing on investing in AI software use cases for construction and real estate.
Mach9 is among the few startups looking to modernize the planning-to-building pipeline for construction and infrastructure. Actually, the startup has its eyes on disrupting CAD software. This is 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.
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Mach9 developed and trained its own in-house AI models to reach the centimeters-accurate level needed by construction and infrastructure work. “That’s not something that a lot of off-the-shelf models are able to do or deliver at in any capacity,” he said.
The startup has plans to split up the funding between improving the product and hiring industry experts. It is also looking forward to scaling ‘all parts of their organization to keep up with where the market is taking them.
Baikovitz is grateful for having initially going the hardware path. Taking this route gave the startup something to pitch to potential customers. And the best thing is that those customers told them they didn’t want better devices to capture data.
“I’m not interested in getting this cheaper, lower-cost hardware,” he remembers one VP telling him. But better software could “improve our efficiency in delivering these big statewide transportation mapping initiatives,” he said.
Remember, Mach9 is a robotics-first startup selling to civil engineers. It now leads with software economics instead of hardware. We have to wait and see what the future has in store for the startup based on the route they are taking.
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