TerraFirma

As SpaceX 's Elon Musk sells investors on a space economy with life beyond Earth, a two-year-old construction startup founded by two of the company's former engineers is positioning itself for the future of interplanetary infrastructure. TerraFirma on Tuesday said it raised $115 million in a funding round with investments from Kleiner Perkins, Bain Capital Ventures, and defense tech companies SpaceX, Anduril and Hadrian . The Austin-based company uses a combination of interfaces, including Xbox controllers, to remotely operate construction equipment, and says its tools cut costs and improve safety.

Long-term, the company wants to build on Mars. "Infrastructure is a bottleneck to basically every single industry that needs to innovate over the next couple of decades," CEO and co-founder Noah Schochet told CNBC. "There's such a deficit of people taking all of the great tech that has existed and been built for the last couple decades and bringing it" to the construction industry. The company plans to use the funding to hire 300 employees over the next year and build both a Texas factory and a mission control center. Terrafirma is part of a growing network of startups spun out of SpaceX that are looking to capitalize on the budding space economy.

Other famous startups from former SpaceX alumni include hypersonic weapons maker Castelion and Realativity Space. SpaceX's historic $86 billion IPO last month, coupled with NASA's push to establish a lunar base on the Moon and Mars, has sparked fresh optimism for the sector. Over time, this future could include moving industry to Mars or the Moon to build solar cells and more easily launch data centers into space. Schochet and Noah McGuinness, the company's founders, met about a decade ago on the first day of engineering class at Princeton University.

Over the next four years, the pair endured very similar course loads and worked on every project. After graduation, both founders landed at SpaceX. McGuinness worked on the government satellite program known as Starshield, while Schochet worked on Starlink and later Starship. While there, the team was under constant pressure to build and quickly scale, sometimes working in difficult conditions and facing infrastructure struggles, like reliable bathrooms.