On October 21, 2026, San Francisco-based Mach9 announced a $34 million Series A funding round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Founded in 2021 by Carnegie Mellon University researchers as a hardware startup, Mach9 pivoted in 2024 to AI-powered CAD software after discovering that data processing was civil engineering's primary bottleneck. Its Digital Surveyor platform automates LiDAR feature extraction, accelerating site mapping up to 100 times faster for major engineering clients.
Series A details and investors
- ▪Mach9 plans to split its $34 million Series A funding between product development, hiring industry experts, and organizational scaling.
- ▪Quiet Capital and New York-based venture firm Prudence participated in Mach9's $34 million Series A funding round.
- ▪On October 21, 2026, San Francisco-based Mach9 announced a $34 million Series A funding round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Company origins and pivot to software
- ▪Carnegie Mellon University researchers Alexander Baikovitz, Zachary Sussman, Haowen Shi, and Michael Mong founded Mach9 in 2021 as a surveying hardware company named Mach9 Robotics.
- ▪Pivoting to software allowed Mach9's CAD platform to process data from various existing LiDAR scanners rather than restricting clients to proprietary hardware.
- ▪Mach9 dropped Robotics from its name and fully pivoted from hardware to AI CAD software in 2024 after customer feedback revealed data processing was civil engineers' main workflow bottleneck.
Digital Surveyor software and capabilities
- ▪Mach9 launched Digital Surveyor Version 2 in March 2026 as a web-based CAD platform that uses AI to convert LiDAR point clouds into structured engineering drawings.
- ▪Mach9 developed and trained proprietary in-house AI models to turn multimodal image and laser scan datasets into survey-grade geometry at centimeter accuracy.
- ▪Mach9's AI software automatically generates first-draft plans from LiDAR survey data, allowing licensed civil engineers to refine and adjust vertices to satisfy industry liability requirements.
Efficiency gains over traditional CAD methods
- ▪Traditional legacy CAD software from incumbents like Autodesk and Bentley Systems requires approximately one week per mile for engineers to trace site data manually.
- ▪Mach9 states that its AI software accelerates CAD feature extraction and project delivery by 10 to 100 times compared to manual drafting methods.
Adoption and customer traction
- ▪Mach9's customer roster includes civil engineering firms Langan, Olsson, HNTB, and WSP, as well as multiple state Departments of Transportation and nearly 100 private beta users.
- ▪Mach9's Digital Surveyor platform has processed more than 100,000 miles of surveyed infrastructure across over 2,500 projects in all 50 U.S. states.
Mach9 early backing and recognition
- ▪Prior to its Series A, Mach9 closed a $12 million seed round led by Quiet Capital in late 2024, bringing its total pre-Series A funding to between $12.34 million and $15 million.
- ▪Y Combinator backed Mach9, and Forbes recognized the startup's team in its 2026 30 Under 30 list for Transportation and Aerospace.
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