The civil engineer who got tired of watching people mark dots by hand, and built a robot to do it.
A surveyor spends the day in the desert, marking thousands of coordinates on the ground so a solar farm gets built where the blueprint says it should. Tom Yeshurun watched that happen, did the math, and pointed a robot at the problem.
On a highway project years ago, Tom Yeshurun was the construction engineer keeping the schedule honest - subcontractors, contracts, the money. Somewhere in the budget was a line item that stuck with him: surveyors were spending more than $2 million just marking coordinates. Not building anything. Marking where things should go.
Surveying is the quiet first step of every project. Someone reads the blueprint, then walks the site planting stakes and spraying paint so crews know where to dig, pour, and bolt. Get it wrong and everything downstream is wrong. As Yeshurun puts it, "Everything starts with the blueprints. And if the blueprint is wrong, or if you mark it incorrectly, you're building incorrectly."
When he later looked at solar-farm construction, the inefficiency turned into an obsession. Solar sites need thousands of coordinates staked every day, often in brutal desert heat, by skilled surveyors who are in short supply. It was slow, expensive, physically punishing, and error-prone. It was also, he realized, exactly the kind of repetitive, precise task a machine could own.
"We're trying to give construction companies tools to empower the workforce they have with super-powers."
- Tom YeshurunThe company didn't start on wheels. It started in the air. Yeshurun became CEO of Civdrone in 2018, working on early autonomous systems for construction. But drones, for all their appeal, weren't the right tool for planting a physical mark in the dirt with millimeter precision. So the team came back down to earth.
In 2020 he co-founded Civ Robotics around a small, rugged, wheeled rover called CivDot. It drives itself across a site using GPS and RTK correction, finds each coordinate, and marks it with onboard spray paint at roughly 8-millimeter accuracy. It keeps working in rain and on uneven ground. A single unit can mark up to 3,000 points in a day.
The productivity gap is the whole pitch. A skilled surveyor marks around 200 points on a good day. A CivDot operator, after a short training, clears 1,000 and more. Same crew, more output - which is Yeshurun's point about superpowers rather than pink slips. He estimates robotics can let a construction workforce do "three to four times more" per person.
Yeshurun's approach to building hardware is unglamorous on purpose. "Keep it simple, spend time in the field with customers to gain their feedback, and iterate quickly, even if it is not fully baked." It shows up in small choices - CivDot supports both zig-zag and snake path optimization, because operators have preferences and the robot has to fit their workflow, not the other way around.
The field-first habit pays off in signals most founders would kill for. During customer trainings, buyers ordered additional units on the spot and started suggesting use cases the team hadn't planned for. When people spend more money before you've finished onboarding them, you've found something real.
The impact reads clearly on a balance sheet. On one year-long desert solar project, a customer cut surveying costs from about $2 million to $700,000 while improving throughput and taking workers out of the most dangerous, repetitive parts of the job.
"Everything starts with the blueprints. If you mark it incorrectly, you're building incorrectly."
- Tom YeshurunThe through-line in Yeshurun's story isn't robotics - it's execution. He served in the Israel Defense Forces as a ground-forces officer, a job that rewards getting things done in messy, real-world conditions. He earned a civil engineering degree and then an entrepreneurship MBA, both from the Technion in Israel. He ran a roughly $100 million infrastructure project before he ever thought about a startup.
His co-founder brings rails and ports experience to complement Tom's roads and highways, and the pair started out in Tel Aviv. Around 2023, Yeshurun moved to San Francisco to build the company's US sales and operations - closer to the solar customers who needed the robots most.
That construction-first perspective is why Civ Robotics doesn't read like a Silicon Valley moonshot. It reads like an engineer's answer to a problem he personally hated. The technology is impressive, but it exists to solve a specific, annoying, expensive bottleneck he lived through.
Robotics and technology will empower the workforce to do more per headcount - in the range of three to four times more.
Keep it simple, spend time in the field with customers, and iterate quickly, even if it is not fully baked.
In July 2025, Civ Robotics closed a $7.5 million Series A led by AlleyCorp, with Bobcat Co. and ff Venture Capital joining, bringing total funding past $12.5 million. The plan is to keep developing the robots and push into new global markets, with renewable energy and solar at the center.
The longer arc is bigger than marking dots. Yeshurun wants to automate more of the build: "Contribute to more phases of construction, from layout to distribution and installation. Who knows, maybe QC and later O&M." Layout is the wedge. Material distribution, installation, quality control, and operations sit further out on the same roadmap.
By August 2025, CNBC was profiling the little rovers changing how solar farms get built. The framing has shifted from curiosity to infrastructure - which is roughly where Yeshurun wanted construction robotics to land all along: not a novelty, but the quiet first step of the job, done by a machine.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Civ Robotics, a San Francisco construction-technology company that builds autonomous robots to automate land surveying and site layout. He is a civil engineer trained at the Technion in Israel.
Civ Robotics makes ground-based robots, notably the CivDot, that automatically mark survey and layout points on construction sites at roughly 8-millimeter accuracy - up to 3,000 points a day - primarily for solar and other large-scale projects.
In July 2025 the company raised a $7.5 million Series A led by AlleyCorp, with Bobcat Co. and ff Venture Capital, bringing total funding to more than $12.5 million.
He served as an officer in the Israeli ground forces, earned a BSc in Civil Engineering and an MBA from the Technion, managed large road-construction projects, and led Civdrone before co-founding Civ Robotics in 2020.
No. Yeshurun frames the robots as tools to empower the existing workforce, letting teams mark and verify layouts faster and more safely rather than cutting headcount.