Summary
Terranova builds autonomous, car-sized robots that inject a wood-waste slurry 40 to 60 feet underground to lift flood-prone and subsiding land, without disturbing the surface. The Berkeley, California-based startup emerged from stealth in November 2025 with an oversubscribed $7 million seed round, pitching its “terraforming” process as a far cheaper and faster alternative to levees, seawalls, and conventional fill for cities, developers, and infrastructure operators facing sea-level rise and land subsidence.
Company Story
Terranova’s origins trace to 2021, when founder Laurence Allen, then a UC Berkeley mechanical engineering undergraduate interning at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, began developing and patenting a technique for lifting land by injecting material deep underground. Allen grew up in San Rafael, California, a city built partly on fill along San Francisco Bay that has subsided roughly three feet in some neighborhoods and faces flood-mitigation cost estimates in the hundreds of millions of dollars; solving that problem became the company’s founding motivation (TechCrunch).
Allen founded the company in 2022 as Levitree while still at UC Berkeley, with his father Trip Allen and Georgia Tech computer science student Cole Johnson as co-founders, drawing support from Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET), Berkeley SkyDeck, and Bakar Labs (UC Berkeley SCET; Bakar Bio Labs). After Allen completed his degree in 2024, the company rebranded to Terranova and moved to full-time operation, spending over a year testing its robots and injection process at a pilot site before going public with its technology (YesPress).
In November 2025, Terranova emerged from stealth, announcing a $7 million seed round that closed three times oversubscribed at a $25.1 million valuation, co-led by Outlander and Congruent Ventures with participation from GoAhead Ventures, Gothams, and Ponderosa, a fund within Galvanize Climate Solutions. The company said it had signed a deal with a major natural-disaster mitigation company around the same time and was targeting its first commercial elevation projects in early 2026 (The Robot Report).
Founders
Laurence Allen is Terranova’s co-founder and CEO. He conceived the company’s core subsurface-injection technique in 2021 during an undergraduate internship at SpaceX, founded the company as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley (B.S., Mechanical Engineering, 2024), and has been its public face, describing the mission as combining “heavy robotics and geotechnical innovation to literally reshape the world.” He later began a master’s degree at Stanford before taking a leave of absence to scale Terranova full-time, and was named to Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” list in the Energy and Green Tech category (The Robot Report; Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability).
Trip Allen, Laurence Allen’s father, co-founded the company and served as its first CEO from 2021 before moving into the Executive Chairman role in July 2025 as Laurence took over day-to-day leadership. A materials engineer with prior experience at NASA, Dow Chemical, and his own plastics-recycling company, MBA Polymers, he identified waste wood as a scalable land-injection material after researching historical land-lifting projects, and has described watching flooding become “an existential problem” for his and Laurence’s shared hometown of San Rafael (The Robot Report; Substack — Jason Carman).
Cole Johnson co-founded the company and serves as Head of Software Engineering. A computer science student and AI robotics researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, he leads Terranova’s embedded systems, simulation, and data-analytics engineering, building the software that models subsurface conditions and plans robotic injection campaigns (Cole Johnson personal site; portfolio.colebjohnson.com).
Products
Terranova’s system consists of three autonomous, tracked injection robots working with one “mothership” unit. The mothership stores and mixes a proprietary slurry made primarily from waste wood, pumping it out from a roughly 20-foot shipping container to the injection robots, which rove around a work site and drill wells to deliver the slurry to depths of about 40 to 60 feet. The injected slurry hydraulically lifts and consolidates the land above it, without significant surface disturbance, and consolidates within about two hours of injection (TechCrunch).
The system is guided by software that models subsurface soil composition and flood risk using public geographic data and well-drilling core samples, and uses a genetic algorithm to determine injection patterns that achieve a target surface elevation, with city planners, contractors, and other stakeholders able to plan projects using a “SimCity-like” design tool. Human operators remain on-site during injection as a safety precaution. According to Terranova, its three-robot-and-mothership system can lift roughly one acre of land by one foot per day, and the company markets its process for development, wetlands restoration, community flood protection, infrastructure, defense, and mining applications (Terranova; The Robot Report).
Because the slurry is primarily waste wood, and buried wood does not decay as long as it stays wet, Terranova also markets its process as a carbon-sequestration method and says it can sell carbon credits to help offset project costs.
Funding
Terranova raised a $7 million seed round, announced in November 2025, that closed three times oversubscribed at a $25.1 million valuation. The round was co-led by Outlander and Congruent Ventures, with participation from GoAhead Ventures, Gothams, and Ponderosa, a climate-focused fund within Galvanize Climate Solutions (The Robot Report; The AI Insider). The company said the funding would support its first commercial field projects, scale production of its robotic systems, and grow its engineering and field-deployment teams.
Partnerships
Terranova has said it plans to generate revenue by splitting proceeds from land-elevation projects with civil contractors rather than acting as a general contractor itself. Around its November 2025 funding announcement, the company said it had signed a deal with a major natural-disaster mitigation company, though it has not named the partner publicly. Terranova has quoted a $92 million proposal to lift 240 acres of its founder’s hometown, San Rafael, California, by four feet, and has said it has engaged with California officials, including a visit from state treasurer Fiona Ma, on flood-resilience planning.
Timeline
- 2021: Laurence Allen conceives the subsurface wood-injection concept during a SpaceX internship and begins filing related patents.
- 2022: Allen founds the company as Levitree at UC Berkeley, with co-founders Trip Allen and Cole Johnson, backed by SCET, Berkeley SkyDeck, and Bakar Labs.
- 2024: Allen graduates from UC Berkeley; the company rebrands to Terranova and moves to full-time operation.
- November 2025: Terranova emerges from stealth with an oversubscribed $7 million seed round at a $25.1 million valuation.
- December 2025: CEO Laurence Allen is named to Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” list and takes a leave of absence from Stanford to scale Terranova full-time.
- Early 2026 (planned): Terranova targets its first commercial land-elevation projects.
Market Context
Terranova competes in an emerging category of “terraforming” or land-elevation robotics that sits at the intersection of construction robotics, climate adaptation technology, and geotechnical engineering, rather than against traditional humanoid or industrial-robotics peers. Its stated point of comparison is conventional flood infrastructure — levees, seawalls, and surface fill — which it argues costs far more and takes far longer to build than its robotic subsurface injection process. Land-lifting via subsurface injection is not new in geotechnical engineering, but Terranova’s pitch rests on using inexpensive waste-wood slurry and purpose-built autonomous robots, rather than costlier conventional grouting materials and manually operated equipment, to substantially lower the cost of large-scale elevation projects.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Terranova’s own website, contemporaneous reporting from The Robot Report and TechCrunch on its November 2025 seed round and technology, a UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology founder profile, a Bakar Bio Labs feature on the company’s earlier Levitree branding, and biographical and career details from YesPress and co-founder Cole Johnson’s personal site and portfolio. Terranova is an early-stage company that has not yet completed a commercial field project at the time of writing (mid-2026); claims about system performance, project economics, and timelines reflect company statements and should be reassessed as its first commercial deployments are completed.