CEO SERIES Episode 11:
A Conversation with Civ Robotics CEO Tom Yeshurun

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My name is Tom Yeshurun, and I'm the CEO of Civ Robotics. We are automating land surveying in construction projects. What is land surveying? And how we came to this market? A bit about myself, I came from the construction background. I worked in road construction before I started this venture, and my co-founder worked in rails and ports.

And we're originally based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. And I'm now in the US, been here for over two years now, with sales and operations in San Francisco. I was really shocked how inefficient things are in construction. How everything was very conservative and old school. We thought that we should automate a lot of these things, and surveying was one of the first things that come to mind.

I first used drone technology in the space. And as we evolved as a product, we focused in on ground robots to do autonomous layouts. Which is basically marking the coordinates in the real world to ensure that contractors are building based on the blueprints. We have great team in Israel with good experience in the robotics and the defense industry, alongside with sales here with a background in construction and GIS.

Now, we're not trying to replace people, everyone say robotics taking our jobs, we're not doing that. We're trying to give the customers and the construction companies tools to empower the workforce that they have with super-powers. Because it's a huge market, it's growing all the time. And people just do not enjoy doing this kind of work, and therefore we're trying to give them more capabilities.

And the main problem that we're helping to solve is that projects are delayed, 90% of them, to be precise. And the main reason is that we just don't have enough people in the field doing this kind of work. And this number is getting less and less people want to do this work.

And then one that we do have, let's just say they're not the brightest people in the world sometimes. And mistakes do happen, we are human after all. These mistakes cause more work for the contractor, and the main reason is miscommunication. And at the end of the day, everything starts with the blueprints.

And if the blueprint is wrong, or if you mark it incorrectly, you're building incorrectly. Cuz the contractor does not know what is it that does need to be done. So we're solving this problem by automating this process, the layouts, with our autonomous robots. They're about eight times faster, shaving us at least half the cost, depending on volume, amount of markings you need to do every day.

And we're reaching up to 1/2" accuracy. We have two models, and I'll show you both. Cuz we are provided the right tool for the right job. Some customers are okay with 4" accuracy for certain tasks, like to put a fence line. Or you're doing just measurements of the ground, or you're distributing materials.

You don't need to be that precise. And then we have our more precise system for roads. Here we're doing dash lines for a road project. And the robotic arm moves in real-time to achieve that 1/2" accuracy. And we also being used in solar farm with a 1/2" accuracy robot to mark where the posts go.

And after that, they pound those posts in the grounds, and place the beam for the piles. And when I say posts, on this job alone, they had over 800,000 posts that had to be laid out this way. Imagine doing this in the summertime in the desert for about a year, versus the robot doing it for you.

Our pricing model is very straightforward. We have a RaaS model, robot as a service, and our customers pay us $6,000 a month for the CIVDot and 8,250 for the + model. Or some customers that wanna subcontract the work, we provide it for them as a full service with an operator on site.

And the price varies depending on the type of marking, a nail, a flag, or just spray paint can be enough for some use cases. We're working with customers across the US, from Hawaii all the way to Jersey. From roads to solar to data centers, and even planting trees.

Some case studies, great to share. A CIVDot customer used to spend $2 million on this task for this kind of project. They actually put in their books 2 million for this task with four crews working day after day. They did it with us with one crew and $700,000 in spending.

When I say $700,000 in spending, that's including everything, labor, our machine, materials, managements. With the + model, not as much output as you saw, it's slower. But we're achieving that 1/2" accuracy, which is valuable and required for that task. And again, saving about 60% of the costs with one crew, less boots on the ground, a repetitive task on a project in the desert for almost a year.

That's it from me for now. I will be happy to answer questions you may have looking forward to this panel.

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CivRobotics is a developer and provider of construction robotics designed to improve land surveying
ffVC first invested in CivRobotics in 2021
Tom Yeshurun
Co-founder & CEO
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