A geospatial software startup is taking on a bigger office footprint and re-establishing its headquarters to make space for its growing employee headcount.
Mach9, previously Mach9 Robotics, has taken over about 2,500 square feet of space in Bloomfield at 4041 Liberty Ave., which is owned by RDC Inc. affiliate Liberty Empire LP. It encompasses part of the space that Agility Robotics used before it expanded to Lawrenceville.
It's a move that Mach9 Co-Founder and CEO Alexander Baikovitz is excited about, especially given the potential to expand into more space if and when the time comes. He said the company had been operating out of a smaller, less suitable facility before the move.
"[Our previous place] was more of like a warehousey-type place, kind of hackerish," Baikovitz said. "Now it's more of a traditional office space where we have the ability to have a wide range of [amenities]."
Added Grant Vandenbussche, who Mach9 brought in at a limited capacity, for now, to help the startup scale following his stint as the chief category officer at now-shuttered vertical farming startup Fifth Season: "You can give tours to the customers here … and this is a much more suited environment. There's a conference room here with a real table."
Most of the company's 12-person team is based in Pittsburgh, Baikovitz said, and the startup is actively looking to fill at least five other positions mostly involving engineering-related roles. He said Mach9, one of Pittsburgh Inno's Startups to Watch in 2022, is also looking to kick off a new investment round soon that will add to the $2.5 million its raised in venture funding so far.
The move also comes at a pivotal time for the company.
Baikovitz said that seven months ago, Mach9 began a transition that saw it drop its main focus as a hardware-centered infrastructure scanning startup to one that serves as a software-first company that's now building a platform for architecture, engineering and construction firms to use that will aid them with their respective data interpretation challenges. According to Baikovitz, this is a common feat for organizations that collect vast troves of infrastructure maps via Lidar and other sensors to overcome as it can take entire teams of people to decipher and identify how to best use such information.
Revenue-producing Mach9 is positioning itself to be that solution, Baikovitz said, though he declined to provide revenue figures at this time.
"We've been really focused on ways to take people's mapping data and generate engineering CAD models directly from it," Baikovitz said. "It's been an exciting shift for the company that has allowed us to grow as we scaled our operation with our customers across the United States as well as overseas."
He also teased an upcoming beta launch of the startup's software platform to come out in the next few months that will be used by yet-to-be-named firms that have operations across the globe.
"What we're really excited about is launching a large group of beta customers that are going to be a part of a major release of this first geospatial production software product," Baikovitz said. "So some of the leading engineering and construction companies that do work on every continent, effectively, are going to be among the first users of this type of capability that saves them a tremendous amount of time and money in doing their day-to-day work."
