land-surveying
(3)
Steve Zeets Measures the Ground From the Sky
A rodman learned to fly, an FAA webpage blinked, and an Iowa surveyor built a career around one stubborn question: can drone data be trusted on the ground?
Tom Yeshurun
Tom Yeshurun is the co-founder and CEO of Civ Robotics, a San Francisco construction-technology company building autonomous robots that automate land surveying and site layout. A civil engineer by training who managed a $100 million road project in Israel before founding the company, Yeshurun watched surveyors spend millions marking coordinates by hand in desert heat and set out to automate the task. Civ Robotics' CivDot robots now stake out survey points with roughly 8-millimeter accuracy and mark up to 3,000 points a day, and its technology has been deployed on solar projects representing more than 20 gigawatts of capacity. In July 2025 the company raised a $7.5 million Series A led by AlleyCorp.
Civ Robotics
Civ Robotics builds autonomous ground robots and software that automate the slow, error-prone work of construction layout and land surveying. Its flagship CivDot robots mark thousands of survey coordinates per day at millimeter accuracy - up to 8x faster than traditional survey crews - letting a single operator stake out solar farms, roads, airports and earthworks without specialized surveying expertise. Founded in 2018 and based in San Francisco with roots in Tel Aviv, the company has deployed over 100 robots across 40+ countries and marked more than 10 million coordinates.