Alexander Baikovitz knows Pittsburgh's steel helped build the nation's infrastructure decades ago, but he's hoping the technology being developed in the city today will be able to keep that infrastructure standing in the future as it continues to age.
As the CEO and co-founder of Mach9 Robotics, Baikovitz wants to bring his company's tech to the forefront of critical infrastructure inspection. The Bloomfield-based startup company uses robots and sensors to map surface and subsurface areas that can be converted into geospatial renderings of critical infrastructure in a matter of minutes instead of what would usually take teams of people months to accomplish.
The recent collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge has only further heightened Baikovitz desire to deploy his company's proven technology across municipalities, and he's hoping to do exactly that locally with the launch of the Pittsburgh Bridge Initiative.
It's an effort that will look to partner with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the City of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well as civil engineers, land surveyors and construction firms to better see the unseen as it relates to potential underground infrastructure weaknesses in areas that surround the city's bridges. The initiative will also feature Mach9 deploying its technology — this time equipped on a truck — across the nearly 450 bridges within the City of Pittsburgh to map and then display them in a way that's never been done before.
"What we're focused on within this initiative is learning more about how can we build technology that helps the bridge inspectors, that helps engineers and regulators understand information in a traceable, understandable, less biased way," Baikovitz said. "And then the second component is, how do we actually enable huge-scale mapping? We're doing things that really haven't been done by small entities before, typically it's been reserved for massive surveying companies, civil engineers or technology companies to do this, but we're creating this grassroots movement where we're figuring out how to create these ultra-high-definition maps of effectively entire cities."
The company has embarked on beginning to map Pittsburgh bridges and hopes to land contracts and partnerships down the road to work with Pittsburgh, other municipalities and transportation agencies.
Baikovitz said Mach9 has been working on infrastructure-related problems for over a year now since founding the company with Haowen Shi in early 2021. Mach9's five-person team was a part of Carnegie Mellon University’s VentureBridge initiative and it has raised a total of $2.5 million in funding from Tiger Global Management LLC, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Pathfinder Capital, Fitbit co-founder James Park, Quiet Capital and Liquid2 Ventures, among others. It's also one of Pittsburgh Inno's 10 Startups to Watch in 2022.
Now, with this initiative launched, Baikovitz said the startup is excited to expand its communication efforts with organizations and governments that could stand to benefit immensely from the company's tech.
"Certainly, the Pittsburgh Bridge Initiative is the opportunity for us to be able to build out technology that fundamentally understands or better identifies how to look at tons of data points about these bridges in particular, and about critical infrastructure, and being able to diagnose and detect problems early and really being able to provide this information in a communicable way so that policymakers and stakeholders can make more concrete decisions based on all of the different levels of information and data as if they were actually on-site and on a bridge that actually could be having an incident like what we just saw at Fern Hollow," Baikovitz said. "Our motivation and our passion right now is; what can we enable from a technological development perspective to provide this level of information to people that need it the most."
