PersonFounderEngineer
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Terranova, a Berkeley-based startup building autonomous terraforming robots that literally lift flood-prone land out of harm's way by injecting wood waste slurry deep underground. A UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering graduate (Class of 2024) who dreamed up the idea during a 2021 SpaceX internship, Allen launched the company - originally called Levitree - to save his own hometown of San Rafael, California, which floods to waist depth several times a decade. Terranova raised a $7M seed round in 2025 at a $25.1M valuation led by Congruent Ventures and Outlander, and can lift one acre of land by one foot per day at a fraction of the cost of traditional seawalls.
climate-techroboticscarbon-sequestrationflood-preventionterraformingland-elevation
