SOURCES · 15
CITED
Every claim, cited.
This pressing makes specific, checkable claims about productivity, market size, and one company’s work. Here is where each one comes from. Primary sources first, then research, then press.
PRODUCTIVITY & THE DATA
-
The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector, 1950-2020. Value added per worker roughly 40% lower in 2020 than 1970; a counterfactual ~10% higher aggregate productivity.
- Construction Physics ↗ RESEARCH
Estimates of ~1.15 square feet built per labor-hour and an on-site labor share around 50%.
THE MARKET
- McKinsey & Company ↗ RESEARCH
The construction-productivity opportunity, sized at roughly $1.6 trillion a year.
- Grand View Research ↗ RESEARCH
Construction robot market projected to reach $3.66B by 2030 at an 18.0% CAGR.
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Estimate that construction needed to attract roughly 439,000 additional workers in 2025.
- Construction Coverage ↗ RESEARCH
Industry spending and labor-market context for U.S. construction.
THE COMPANY
- TerraFirma ↗ PRIMARY
Company site, product, and careers.
- Business Wire ↗ PRESS
Funding announcement: $115M raised, $100M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, July 2026.
- The Robot Report ↗ PRESS
Coverage of TerraFirma’s retrofit approach to autonomous earthmoving.
- Kleiner Perkins ↗ PRESS
Investor of record for the Series A; the Josh Coyne quote and the company film.
THE LAB
- akshatjain.org/terrafirma ↗ PRIMARY
Akshat Jain’s Totem, a 4-DOF arm driving a real excavator, and the live person-detection pipeline (YOLO to SSD MobileNet V2; Coral TPU to Jetson Nano).
CREDITS
- Photography PRIMARY
Reference photography licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; credit to the individual photographers.
- Film stills PRIMARY
© Kleiner Perkins / TerraFirma. Used for editorial reference.
Figures are reported as of mid-2026 from the sources above. Company-reported metrics, such as per-operator effectiveness, are labeled as such throughout. Corrections: the editor, via The Press.