当亚历克斯·贝科维茨（Alex Baikovitz）在2021年联合创立Mach9 Robotics时，他的目标是为土木工程师提供一种更高效、更快捷、成本更低的视觉检测工具。该公司希望打破繁琐的官僚程序，革新那些阻碍美国建筑行业发展的陈旧流程。
When Alex Baikovitz co-founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021, his goal was to build a better, faster, and cheaper way for civil engineers to do visual inspections. The company aimed to cut through red tape and modernize the slow, outdated processes that bog down construction in the United States.
短短几年内，Mach9 Robotics就研发出了所需的硬件设备，但这一过程让贝科维茨意识到：硬件本身并非真正的瓶颈。
Within a few years, Mach9 Robotics had built that hardware, but the effort led Baikovitz to a realization: hardware wasn’t the bottleneck.
“我们发现，对于土木工程公司来说，从这些先进的激光扫描仪和图像采集系统中提取数据并将其转化为可用于设计的详细地图是一件极其繁琐的工作，”他在接受TechCrunch采访时说道。“真正的难题在于他们的工作流程，以及如何将他们收集到的海量数据转化为真正有用的信息，从而帮助工程师做出最佳的设计和资产管理决策。”
“We saw how tedious it was for civil engineering organizations to take data from these amazing laser scanners and image data capture systems and turn that into a usable survey,” he told TechCrunch in an interview, referring to a detailed map of a site that engineers use for design work. “The real pain was in their workflows,” he said, and “how to turn all the endless amounts of data that they’re able to collect into . . .information that people can use to make the best design and asset management decisions across the board.”
因此，贝科维茨决定将公司名称中的“Robotics”去掉，转而专注于开发基于人工智能的计算机辅助设计（CAD）软件。这一策略取得了成功：Mach9的软件在私人测试阶段已经吸引了近100位客户，并已被应用于超过2500个项目中。
So Baikovitz dropped “Robotics” from the company’s name and pivoted to developing AI-powered computer-aided design (CAD) software instead. The bet paid off, as Mach9 has racked up nearly 100 customers for the private beta of its software, and they’ve used it on more than 2,500 projects to date.
这一良好的发展势头为Mach9带来了新的资金支持。周三，该公司宣布完成了一轮3400万美元的A轮融资，该轮融资由First Round Capital和Bessemer Venture Partners共同领投。参与投资的还包括Prudence（一家专注于投资建筑和房地产领域人工智能软件应用的初创企业）以及Quiet Capital（该公司此前已是Mach9的股东）。
That momentum helped Mach9 unlock new funding. On Wednesday, the startup announced a $34 million Series A funding round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Also throwing in were Prudence, an early-stage, New York-based firm that focuses on investing in AI software use cases for construction and real estate, and Quiet Capital, a VC firm already on the cap table.
Mach9 是众多初创公司之一，正竞相实现建筑和基础设施从规划到建设流程的现代化。8 月，一家名为 CivilGrid 的初创公司筹集了 2600 万美元，用于发展其所谓的“地下管线版 Google Maps”。与此同时，利用 AI 在短短几分钟内生成符合规范、可直接申请许可的建筑蓝图的 Blueprints AI，入选了上周 TechCrunch Disrupt 大会 Startup Battlefield 竞赛的前 200 强公司。
Mach9 is one of a number of startups racing to modernize the planning-to-building pipeline for construction and infrastructure. In August, a startup called CivilGrid raised $26 million to grow what it calls the “Google Maps for the underground.”Meanwhile, Blueprints AI, which uses AI to produce code-compliant, permit-ready architectural blueprints in just a few minutes, was among the top 200 companies in the Startup Battlefield competition at last week’s TechCrunch Disrupt.
Baikovitz 表示，Mach9 专注于颠覆 CAD 软件，因为它是整个流程中最慢、最耗人力的环节之一。
Baikovitz said Mach9 is focused on disrupting CAD software because it’s one of the slowest and most labor-intensive pieces of that overall pipeline.
他说：“交付一个项目需要数月时间，而在传统的 Autodesk 和 Bentley Systems 等巨头开发的老牌软件中，人工处理每英里约需一周。”
“It takes months to be able to deliver a project, and about a week per mile for someone to do manually in the legacy incumbent software that’s built by the Autodesk and Bentley Systems of the world,” he said.
Mach9 称其软件将大量此类工作自动化，使流程速度提升 10 倍，并大幅降低成本。Baikovitz 表示，这使从事测绘和土木工程工作的客户能够“扩充自身产能，承接更多类型的工作、更大的项目，并拓展实景捕捉数据影响重大基础设施决策的广度和深度”。
Mach9 says its software automates a lot of that work, making the process 10 times faster and dramatically reducing costs. This allows customers doing surveying and civil engineering work to “expand their own capacity and take on more types of work, bigger projects, and expand the reach of how reality-capture data can influence major infrastructure decisions,” Baikovitz said.
Baikovitz 称，Mach9 自主开发并训练了内部 AI 模型，以达到建筑和基础设施工作所要求的厘米级精度。
Baikovitz said Mach9 developed and trained its own in-house AI models to reach the centimeter-accurate level that construction and infrastructure work requires.
“这是许多现成模型根本无法做到或以任何方式实现的，”他说。“自2024年以来，我们开发过程的很大一部分是：我们如何构建行业领先的模型，能够将图像或这些多模态图像和激光扫描数据集转化为测绘级的几何数据，比如精确描绘路缘石、路面标线，完全按照客户想要的方式，达到行业要求的精度。”
“That’s not something that a lot of off-the-shelf models are able to do or deliver at in any capacity,” he said. “A big part of what our development process has looked like since 2024 has been, how do we build the industry leading models that can turn imagery or these multimodal image and laser scan data sets into survey grade like geometry, like tracing out the curbs, the pavement striping, all of this exactly how our customers want it to be at the accuracies that the industry demands.”
Mach9的AI CAD系统接收测绘数据并生成规划初稿，工程师随后可对其进行完善。Baikovitz表示，这家初创公司“为他们提供所有绘制、删除、调整顶点、评估AI生成模型质量的工具，以便他们能有效地为所生成的交付成果背书，因为这个特定行业责任重大，需要持证专业人士来审核。”
Mach9’s AI CAD system takes the survey data and creates a first draft of a plan, which engineers can then refine. The startup is “giving them all of the tools to draw, remove, adjust vertices, assess the quality of the AI-generated model, so that they can put effectively their name behind the deliverable that they’re producing, because there is a lot of liability in this particular industry, and it requires licensed professionals that know what they’re looking at,” Baikovitz said.
至于融资，Baikovitz表示，他的初创公司将把资金分配在改进产品、招聘行业专家，以及“扩大组织各部分规模，以跟上市场带我们去的方向”。回顾过去，Baikovitz说他庆幸最初走的是硬件路线。这给了他的初创公司向潜在客户推介的东西，而且很大程度上是这些客户告诉他，他们不需要更好的设备来采集数据。
As for the funding, Baikovitz said his startup will split it between improving the product, hiring industry experts, and scaling “all parts of our organization to keep up with where the market is taking us.”In retrospect, Baikovitz said he’s thankful that he initially went down the hardware path. It gave his startup something to pitch to potential customers, and it was largely those customers who told him they didn’t need better devices to capture data.
“我不想要更便宜、更低成本的硬件，”他回忆一位副总裁曾告诉他。但更好的软件可以“提高我们交付这些大型全州交通测绘项目的效率”，他说。他补充说，这类项目有助于让Mach9合作过的州，比如得克萨斯州，“变得更加安全[和]高效”。
“I’m not interested in getting this cheaper, lower-cost hardware,” he remembers one VP telling him. But better software could “improve our efficiency in delivering these big statewide transportation mapping initiatives,” he said. He added that such projects help make states that Mach9 has worked with, like Texas, “much more like safe [and] effective.”