This Austin Startup Raised $115M to Build Robot Construction Crews

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Welcome to Austin Founders Feed, your weekly rundown on the people, companies, events, and opportunities shaping one of the most exciting business scenes in the country.

This week, we’re looking at TerraFirma’s recent $115M Series A to expand its semi-autonomous construction platform in Austin area.

Here’s everything that’s happening this week:

Let’s get to it.

— Ken & Warren

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TerraFirma raised approximately $115 million, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, to expand its semi-autonomous construction platform.

The Austin-area company was founded by former SpaceX engineers Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness and recently moved into a 40,000-square-foot headquarters, R&D, and testing facility in Buda.

At SpaceX, they helped build the rockets designed to reach Mars.

Now, they’re focused on what comes next: the machinery and infrastructure needed to actually build there.

Before that technology reaches another planet, though, TerraFirma is putting it to work on construction sites here on Earth.

Its platform combines:

The long-term vision is to turn construction equipment into a coordinated fleet.

Instead of placing one worker inside every machine, TerraFirma believes a single operator could eventually supervise as many as five excavators, bulldozers, and loaders from a remote command center.

That could be especially valuable in Central Texas.

Austin is in the middle of several major infrastructure and construction projects, including extensive highway work. If TerraFirma can help crews complete those projects faster, more safely, and with fewer labor constraints, its impact could extend far beyond one startup.

Austin may be one of the best testing grounds in the country for proving that TerraFirma’s technology works.

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Jami Adkins and Andrés Traslaviña
Founders, People ATX

Jami and Andrés have spent over 30 years combined in talent and recruiting — Andrés on the executive search side, Jami on talent strategy and change management. This year they launched People ATX, a retained search and talent advisory firm built exclusively for Austin's founders, startups, and the investors who back them.

If you have posted a role recently and received 400 applications in a week, half written by the same AI tool you will understand. Post the role that decides whether your next 18 months work, the engineering lead, the first real GTM hire, the operator who can take a team from 12 to 60, and you'll hear almost nothing.

The people who can do those jobs aren't applying. They're being recruited directly, usually while they're winning somewhere else. If your hiring process depends on who shows up, you're choosing from the wrong pool.

Founders tend to price a bad hire at the salary. The real bill is the salary, plus the recruiting cost, plus six to nine months of a critical function running poorly, plus the good people who quietly start interviewing. At a small company, one wrong executive hire can burn a quarter of your runway and most of your momentum.

That math is why every engagement we run starts with strategy, not a job description: we do the mapping, what hires are actually needed and build your plan before we open a single search.

Before you write your next job description, create the scorecard instead: what this person must have accomplished by month six, month twelve, and month eighteen.

Be specific: revenue shipped, team built, system replaced. If you can't write it, you're not ready to open the role. If you can, you've just made the search twice as fast, because now you're screening for outcomes instead of keywords.

Every search we run starts with this framework.

People ATX works across four areas: talent strategy, executive and retained search, AI change management and a career academy because in 2026, deciding who to hire and deciding what AI changes about your org are the same conversation.

The full story, who we are, how engagements work, and how to get our free 2026 Talent Report can be found on the Austin Founders Feed website.

Austin’s economic appeal is increasingly about more than attracting young professionals. It’s also about whether those workers can afford to stay, raise families, and build long-term lives here.

The numbers that back it:

The rankings suggest Austin remains well-positioned to retain workers as they enter their family-building years. Cities where people can build stable lives are better equipped to keep experienced talent, support neighborhood businesses, and develop a deeper long-term workforce.

Austin’s weaker health and safety ranking shows there is still work to do, but its strong affordability and socioeconomic scores give the city a meaningful advantage as it competes for families, employers, and investment.

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