Two former SpaceX engineers took what they learned building rockets - and decided the construction industry needs that same kind of speed.
Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness worked on Starlink, Starship, and Starshield before leaving to start TerraFirma. The company is based in Austin and makes remote-controlled construction equipment. The $115 million round closed on July 14, 2026, led by Kleiner Perkins and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from angel investors at defense tech firms such as SpaceX, Anduril, and Hadrian.
The startup's remote-controlled machinery targets the massive, $2 trillion global construction market, which has historically lagged in automation. Schochet and McGuinness aim to apply SpaceX's iterative design and rapid prototyping ethos to building projects, potentially reducing timelines and labor costs. Large commercial clients have taken notice, with the startup having completed projects such as a sports arena and a Starbucks.
Schochet, the CEO, said the idea came from watching SpaceX churn out rockets the size of skyscrapers at a pace of one per month while construction sites still move at a crawl. "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," he said.
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While automotive and aerospace manufacturing have embraced robotics and digital design, the construction industry has been slow to adopt similar advances. Many projects still rely heavily on manual labor and traditional blueprints, leading to cost overruns and delays. TerraFirma's remote‑controlled machines aim to bridge that gap by bringing precision and efficiency to job sites, improving worker safety and cutting project timelines. The firm's initial client projects - like a sports venue and a coffee shop chain outlet - demonstrate that its system works for more than just specialized tasks.
The timing is not an accident. A month before this funding round, SpaceX staged its own initial public offering at an $86 billion valuation. NASA is also pushing ahead with plans for a lunar base.
But TerraFirma is not betting everything on space. Schochet made that clear. "You don't want to build a community based around a space economy that doesn't yet exist," he said. "You want to build it around the economic drivers that truly drive the world today."
Schochet also pointed out a bigger problem. "Infrastructure is a bottleneck to basically every single industry that needs to innovate over the next couple of decades," he said. He argued there is a shortage of people bringing modern tech into construction - and that is the gap TerraFirma wants to fill.
In the near term, the company wants to prove its technology works on commercial construction projects here on Earth. It will also bid on future projects related to the Moon.
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