When Alex Baikovitz co-founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021, his goal was to build a better, faster, and cheaper way for civil engineers to do visual inspections. The company aimed to cut through red tape and modernize the slow, outdated processes that bog down construction in the United States.

Within a few years, Mach9 Robotics had built that hardware, but the effort led Baikovitz to a realization: hardware wasn’t the bottleneck.

“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,” he told TechCrunch in an interview, referring to a detailed map of a site that engineers use for design work. “The real pain was in their workflows,” he said, and “how to turn all the endless amounts of data that they’re able to collect into . . .information that people can use to make the best design and asset management decisions across the board.”

So Baikovitz dropped “Robotics” from the company’s name and pivoted to developing AI-powered computer-aided design (CAD) software instead. The bet paid off, as Mach9 has racked up nearly 100 customers for the private beta of its software, and they’ve used it on more than 2,500 projects to date.

That momentum helped Mach9 unlock new funding. On Wednesday, the startup announced a $34 million Series A funding round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Also throwing in were Prudence, an early-stage, New York-based firm that focuses on investing in AI software use cases for construction and real estate, and Quiet Capital, a VC firm already on the cap table.

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