Mach9 raises $34M after pivoting to AI CAD software

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.

“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 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 said Mach9 developed and trained its own in-house AI models to reach the centimeter-accurate level that construction and infrastructure work requires.

“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’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.

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.

“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 effective.”