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 The company aimed to cut through red tape and modernize the slow, outdated processes that bog down construction in the United States.

However, as Mach9 developed its hardware, Baikovitz realized the bottleneck lay not in the devices, but in the cumbersome workflows of data processing. The real pain was in turning the endless amounts of data collected into usable information for design and asset management decisions.

Baikovitz dropped “Robotics” from the company’s name and pivoted to developing AI-powered computer-aided design (CAD) software. The bet paid off, as Mach9 has already attracted nearly 100 customers and used its software on over 2,500 projects.

Mach9’s software automates a lot of the work, making the process 10 times faster and dramatically reducing costs. This allows customers to expand their capacity and take on more types of work. The funding will be used to improve the product, hire industry experts, and scale the organization to meet market demands.

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.”