TerraFirma’s semi-autonomous construction equipment
Courtesy: TerraFirma
As SpaceX‘s Elon Musk sells investors on a space economy with life beyond Earth, a two-year-old construction startup founded by two of the company’s former engineers is positioning itself for the future of interplanetary infrastructure.
TerraFirma on Tuesday said it raised $115 million in a funding round with investments from Kleiner Perkins, Bain Capital Ventures, and angel investors tied to defense tech companies SpaceX, Anduril and Hadrian.
The Austin-based company uses a combination of interfaces, including Xbox controllers, to remotely operate construction equipment, and says its tools cut costs and improve safety. Long-term, the company wants to build on Mars.
“Infrastructure is a bottleneck to basically every single industry that needs to innovate over the next couple of decades,” CEO and co-founder Noah Schochet told CNBC. “There’s such a deficit of people taking all of the great tech that has existed and been built for the last couple of decades and bringing it” to the construction industry.
The company plans to use the funding to hire 300 employees over the next year and build both a Texas factory and a mission control center.
TerraFirma is part of a growing network of startups spun out of SpaceX that are looking to capitalize on the budding space economy. Other famous startups from former SpaceX alumni include hypersonic weapons maker Castelion and Relativity Space.
SpaceX’s historic $86 billion IPO last month, coupled with NASA’s push to establish a lunar base on the Moon, has sparked fresh optimism for the sector.
Over time, this future could include moving industry to Mars or the Moon to build solar cells and more easily launch data centers into space.
Schochet and Noah McGuinness, the company’s founders, met about a decade ago on the first day of engineering class at Princeton University. Over the next four years, the pair endured very similar course loads and worked on every project.
After graduation, both founders landed at SpaceX. McGuinness worked on the government satellite program known as Starshield, while Schochet worked on Starlink and later Starship.
While there, the team was under constant pressure to build and quickly scale, sometimes working in difficult conditions and facing infrastructure struggles, like reliable bathrooms.
At the same time, the construction industry was working at a snail’s pace, which sparked an idea: bring the speed of building at SpaceX to the construction industry.
“We’re building rockets the size of skyscrapers at one a month, and all those processes for mass manufacturing automation, none of them are showing up in construction,” Schochet said.
TerraFirma technicians use Xbox controllers to remotely operate heavy equipment
Courtesy: TerraFirma
Looking back, the pair described the experience as physically and mentally “rough,” with days spent sleeping at their desks.
“It was all worth it,” Schochet said. “We were learning at a crazy pace.”
About half of the company’s engineering team also previously worked at SpaceX, Tesla or the Boring Company.
For now, TerraFirma is set on proving its technology on Earth, with recent commercial projects including a sports arena and a Starbucks.
But the firm hasn’t lost sight of its long-term goal and plans to bid on any future moon projects.
“The problem is you don’t want to build a community based around a space economy that doesn’t yet exist,” Schochet said. “You want to build it around the economic drivers that truly drive the world today.”
