The remote-and-autonomous machinery bet is spreading from warehouses to worksites. TerraFirma, a construction-automation startup founded by former SpaceX engineers, said on July 14, 2026 that it raised $115 million in total, anchored by a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins.
The round
Beyond Kleiner Perkins, the investor list runs deep: Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital, Ravelin Capital and Banner VC. The $115 million figure is total capital raised; the newly announced Series A specifically is $100 million. TerraFirma did not disclose a valuation.
What it builds
Founded in 2024 by Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness, TerraFirma sells a full-stack system rather than a single robot: AI-enabled pre-construction software, a remote command-and-control center, and retrofitted heavy machinery — excavators, dozers, loaders, rollers and skid steers — that operators run remotely, in some cases with Xbox-style controllers, and increasingly semi-autonomously. The company claims the setup can lift operator effectiveness by up to about 300%.
Where the money goes
TerraFirma plans to hire roughly 300 workers over the next year and build a new remote-orchestration facility to run fleets from a central hub. The pitch addresses a chronic construction labor shortage by letting fewer, safer operators control more machines from a distance — a model that echoes the teleoperation approaches spreading across logistics and mining.
The moonshot, literally
The founders' SpaceX lineage shows in the framing: TerraFirma says its long-term ambition is to apply the same remote-and-autonomous technology to construction on the Moon and Mars, where human crews are impossible and every machine must be operated at a distance. For now, the near-term market is earthbound job sites — but the space narrative helped attract a blue-chip Series A.