TerraFirma raises $115M to build robotic construction company — starting with Tupperware robots demolishing buildings in Texas

show. We can probably play a trailer on the show, maybe.

But yeah, pick your favorite on the three apps

and uh we'll circle back tomorrow. Well, our next guest is with us in the waiting room. We have Noah from Terrairma. He's the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Doing well. How are you?

In the safety vest. Looking great. Uh with the flag in the back, too. I love it. Uh please introduce yourself and the company. Tell us a little bit about Terrairma. Yeah. So, um, Terrairma was founded by my co-founder and I after we were working at SpaceX and we were trying to build Starship rockets down in Bokh Chica and the construction was just too slow. We're like, why are we able to build rockets the size of skyscrapers at like one a month, but like building a road or or a factory is taking years and years and years. So, we quit our jobs to start a company to change all that. We're basically becoming a new type of construction company, like a full stack construction company. Builds our own robotics software and we actually operate as a construction company ourselves. Okay. Robotic software. So, are you uh how deep in the supply chain are you going to buy uh equipment? Are you buying from Caterpillar and retrofitting them? Are you buying from the people that make the tracks and the treads and the motors and then building your own uh your own bulldozers and cranes? Uh are you using, you know, custom software and robotic automation just as a harness for the project management layer? Like at what level of the stack are you operating now and where do you want to go?

Yeah. Yeah, on the hardware stack, you can probably see behind me, we take existing Caterpillar machines and we retrofit them. Caterpillar, John Deere, Kamasu. Those machines, they're pretty good. They're robust. They've been around for hundreds of years, 100 years. They're pretty good. Everything else we build ourselves. So, we're building all of our own software from scratch. Kind of uh the manufacturing engineering software that we built at SpaceX in order to operate large scale factories. We're building that for construction.

And uh how did you actually go from 0 to one? At this point, you've raised $115 million. Uh what was the first project? Was it find the customer just sort of do it all manually or did you actually build robotic tools first and then go and prototype them? What was the flow?

This is a great question. Um so, uh 12 months ago, we were only four people. So, for the first year of the company, it was just my co-founder and I. We wanted to make sure we had a product market fit before we started like raising a bunch of money and spending it. So, we actually built uh a bunch of robots using Tupperware containers that our lunchbox came in and like Raspberry Pi and Arduino from our college like kits and we got robots working and then we went around asking like who is willing to let us uh make some money with these robots? And our landlord's like, "Hey, I got a building for you to demolish. You think you guys can do it?" We're like, "I mean, it's not rocket science." So, uh, my co-founder and I literally operated the robots ourselves, like in the the brain was a little Tupperware container, and we knocked down a couple buildings and got paid our first check, and we're like, whoa, you could just become a robotic construction company there. It's Texas. Like, you could do whatever you want down here.

That's awesome. Uh what I feel like you'll quickly get to the point where uh permitting is like the gating factor where like you get to the point where hypothetically we could build this, you know, we could build this whole, you know, shell in like the shell that you're in right now, we could build something like that in in 3 weeks, but then you're limited by uh sort of local government and approvals and things like that. Is that is that right? and if so, how are you thinking about approaching that problem?

It's a great question. People bring it up a lot. Um, for starters, I just want to say like permitting is an issue, but it's not the issue. Like at SpaceX, once we had the permits, theoretically, it should go super fast, but construction still took longer than it should have. Like we're operating at maybe 25% of a work week, 9 to 5, 5 days a week. We could operate at 168 hours a week. We could be at 100% utilization rate and we're not. So, you can make construction four times faster once you get the permits before permits are the issue. Now our approach to this is very similar to like how Elon approached building rockets like okay we have to solve manufacturing we have to solve supply chain we have to solve testing the rockets and designing them and now the rockets on the launchpad fix the permits and like I believe in the bureaucrats of this country wanting to make the country better. If you have everything else ready to go and you make their jobs easy and you chew the food for them they'll start approving permits faster and faster. They're not currently the main bottleneck most of the time. Uh, I imagine that we're firmly in the centaur era at best. I imagine that every robotic piece of equipment has a human in the loop somewhere at this point, but walk me through uh your vision for where this goes. I imagine that in the long term it's sort of, you know, you create a, you know, a speck for what you want to build or destroy or or the construction project that you're working on and all of the robots go off and do everything. But, uh, before that happens, it'll probably be one human overseeing two machines. Like, how does all of that? Another way to think about it is like you probably don't want to be like taking the co approach to like same approach as like vibe coding with like building a building because it's like hey go build this ditch and then it builds it like slightly in the wrong place and then you have to like you know fill it back in and you know it feels like uh not as forgiving as the software domain.

This is a great question. Uh do you want the economics answer or do you want the sci-fi answer?

Both. Let's do economics first. Sort of like shortterm. Uh, I mean, we're familiar with Whimo. They have, you know, Overwatch drivers that might see four screens. They can sort of beam into one at a time. How what are the economics of that? And then where do we go from there? And then let's talk sci-fi.

So, in terms of economics, you have two curves that cross. You have the cost of autonomy, which becomes exponentially more expensive as you go from 90 to 95 to 100%. Whimo spent $30 billion or whatever it was over 20 years. Um, and you have the value of automation drops off a cliff. When you have one person controlling one machine to one person controlling two machines, wow, 50% production in labor. But when you're at 1 to four changing to 1 to five, it's difference between 25% of your labor and 20% of your labor. So I think those two curves cross in construction at about one person controlling three or four machines about 75% autonomy. That's the goal for us. 75% autonomy. And then you add a new machine and then you add a new workflow and then you go from dirt works to subsurface utilities to concrete to steel. We're building up the tech tree.

Yeah. And that sort of makes sense because I imagine that uh when you're actually just one like old school piloting a construction machine, uh there's probably about 60% of your time is like downtime. Like I know I need to get the crane from here to here and I've now, you know, push put my finger on the button and I just have to hold it there while I get there. So while that's happening, you can sort of beam into a different machine, do something else and sort of queue them all back and forth.

Yeah, it it's a little bit more video game than that. You ever play like Starcraft or Age of Empires or Victoria?

So we're able to say excavator dig here and you design a task for a minute and it will run for 20 minutes. Then you say bulldozer run here, roller run here. And this is actually our teley operation center.

Sure.

We have like 20 desks behind me and these 20 desks allow us to operate um like 80 machines at a time.

That's very cool. Uh so

what what are your what are Yeah. On the sci-fi front, timelines to, you know, you have a piece of dirt and uh robots arrive to the piece of dirt autonomously and you have zero humans in the loop and you just get a structure in a very short period of time.

You don't want zero humans in a loop. It's not cost-effective. There's so many edge cases in construction. Yeah, but I'm saying like but but if you continue to execute in the way that you're doing right now, wouldn't we be able to get to that point in 10 years, 15 years?

I'm not sure if construction will ever fully be without a human in the loop. I think you'll have like a very small team of people that's very efficient building larger and larger projects and it doesn't ever make sense to get rid of a human. That that's my personal belief. Um, even on Mars, uh, I think we're going to have a small team of astronauts conducting like a large fleet of robots. There's just a lot of things that, uh, edge cases and and things that the robots have never seen before. You can't collect enough training data to simulate every possible thing in the world. Um, but if you're asking me the Sim City moment when I can say I want a road here, I want a restaurant here. I think we're like 5 to 10 years away from that. I think it coincides with our Mars ambitions.

Mhm. Coincides with your Mars, five years to Mars. What are you thinking? We are technologically capable of going to Mars today if we had the political and economic desire.

I mean we've actually sent robots to Mars. Like America has sent robots to Mars. So it's possible.

He's like, "Send me. Send me."

Yeah. It's not a technology problem. It's more so like a economics problem. Um

but I think we will solve both within the next 10 years.

How? But I I imagine that the machines that you build for the moon and Mars will be much more highly specialized. When I think about the the helicopter we deployed to Mars or the rover, like those are science experiments meant to take samples and test specific uh uh specific factors of what it means to move around on Mars. But I imagine even in terms of uh building, you wouldn't just plop down a caterpillar, would you?

No. Diesel engines won't work in vacuums. So, you got to redesign the hardware. But at the end of the day, it's like a smart shovel. Like you're you're moving dirt. It's not the most complicated thing in the world.

Sure. Sure. Sure. Very cool. Well, let's hit the gong.

Yeah. Last question just because

the crowd is loving it. Um, and I wish we had more time, but uh, how do you do you expect any changes to

like the material side like building materials side as robotics become, you know, much more a part of building various types of structures or is it like let's just change one thing at a time because I feel like

this is an awesome question. Um, are you familiar with the term DFM, like design for manufacturing?

Yeah.

Like at SpaceX, we literally had to the materials were pretty simple. It's like stainless steel, like the most common type, but you had to change the inputs to your system to be assembled by a robot. Like Starlink couldn't take V1 Starlink and make it at the speed that they're building V4 Starlink. They had to change the piece parts. I think we're going to change the way we connect pipes. I think we're going to change the

chemical formulations of concrete. We're going to change how we weld steel structures. We're going to redesign the building codes to match something that can be built quickly by a robot.

That's amazing.

I figure.

Tell us about the round. How much did you raise?

So, we've raised $15 million. There you go.

Who Who did you raise it from?

So, our series A was $100 million led by Kleiner Perkins.

We got Bane Capital, Banner, VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Magnetar. Wow. Murderous bro,

Clay Capital. You got a bunch of great folks around the table. Congratulations. You have the capital to build. Uh we need it more than ever right now. So, thank you for everything you're doing and have a great week.

Do us a favor. Raise another massive round.

Yes. Come back.

Maybe maybe take it up up from nine figures to the to the to the next zero.

I like it.

Come back on this year.

You deserve that. But great to meet you.

We'll talk soon and we'll host our next one from the Mars base.