TerraFirma: Built for Earth, Bound for Mars

The U.S. needs to reindustrialize, but we lost the ability to build. The Empire State Building took 13 months to stand up. Today, an equivalent skyscraper takes six or seven years to build. Construction is the rare industry that has gotten worse over time, with productivity falling ~0.5% annually over the past 60 years.

Now that long decline is colliding with the largest build-out America has attempted in generations. Reindustrialization means substations, data centers, factories, and roads: trillions of dollars of demand landing on an industry that is short more than 500,000 workers and about to lose 40% of its current workforce to retirement in the next decade. We can’t hire our way out of this. We have to change what one builder can do.

That is why we’re excited to lead TerraFirma‘s $115 million Series A.

TerraFirma treats a construction site like a factory. Their stack runs from AI pre-construction software that bids, plans, and simulates a job, through a remote command center, down to the machines themselves: excavators, dozers, and loaders retrofitted with a self-driving layer. One skilled operator supervises several machines at once, conducting an orchestra of people and equipment from a room that looks like SpaceX mission control. People stay firmly in the loop. The result: projects that move ~3x faster, significantly cheaper, and much safer than conventional methods.

Over the past year, software engineering has been reorganized around a new shape of work with engineers becoming managers of AI agents. TerraFirma is the first company we’ve seen bring that same shape to the physical world: a fleet of forty-ton machines you supervise and check in on every twenty minutes, rather than one you sit inside of for eight hours. And this isn’t a demo. TerraFirma is already deployed at scale in the field, building data centers, roads, substations, hotels, and more.

None of this is surprising once you meet the team. Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness met their first day at Princeton and went on to work at SpaceX together, where they helped build the largest rocket in history and the largest satellite constellation ever flown. At Starbase, they learned something that stuck with them: the hardest part of getting to Mars was never the rocket. It was the slow, expensive, painful construction of everything around it. And the signs kept accumulating. Schochet once asked Elon what the first ships to Mars would carry; the answer came back: construction robots. Eventually the two Noahs stopped waiting for someone else to build them and left to start TerraFirma.

Hence the name. TerraFirma: solid ground. Prove it on Earth, then take the same machines everywhere humans build next. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the team as they help meet the demands of American reindustrialization.

If you want to build real things in the real world, they’re hiring!