Mach9 has raised a $34 million Series A round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. The San Francisco startup builds AI CAD software that turns survey scans into engineering-ready drawings, and the round takes its total funding to $49 million.
From inspection hardware to software
Alex Baikovitz co-founded the company in 2021 as Mach9 Robotics, setting out to build faster and cheaper inspection hardware for civil engineers. The hardware got built, but customers kept pointing at a different problem. Turning laser scans and site imagery into a usable survey was slow, manual work.
“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.”
Alex Baikovitz, co-founder and CEO of Mach9
Baikovitz dropped Robotics from the company name and rebuilt the product as AI-powered CAD software. Prudence, a New York firm that backs AI software for construction and real estate, joined the Series A alongside existing investor Quiet Capital.
What the software does
Mach9’s Digital Surveyor platform takes 3D reality capture data collected with equipment survey teams already own. Its in-house AI models then draft the physical features of a site, including curbs, road signs, utility poles, lane markings and wires, at centimeter level accuracy.
The company says this produces digital blueprints up to 10 times faster and at one-fifth the cost of conventional drafting. Manual drafting in legacy tools from Autodesk and Bentley Systems takes about a week per mile, and engineers still review and refine every AI generated draft before signing it off.
Traction and where the money goes
Nearly 100 customers are using the software in private beta, across more than 2,500 projects in all 50 states. Mach9 says its platform has supported surveying of more than 100,000 miles of infrastructure corridors, for customers including WSP, HNTB, NV5 and the California Department of Transportation.
The new capital will go into expanding the software, hiring industry experts and scaling the team. The timing works in Mach9’s favour, as federal infrastructure funding drives rebuilding work while the number of licensed surveyors in the United States has fallen 24 percent since 2011.
