Summary
Laurence Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Terranova, a Berkeley, California-based startup building autonomous robots that inject wood-waste slurry deep underground to lift flood-prone and subsiding land. He conceived the company’s core technology in 2021 as a UC Berkeley undergraduate, and was named to Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” list in the Energy and Green Tech category for the work.
Career
Allen grew up in San Rafael, California, a city built partly on fill along San Francisco Bay where parts of the downtown Canal District have subsided roughly three feet, making flooding a recurring problem for his hometown (TechCrunch). While studying mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, he interned at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, in 2021; during that internship, he began developing and filing patents on a subsurface wood-injection technique for lifting land, a problem unrelated to his day-to-day work there (UC Berkeley Sutardja Center).
In 2022, Allen founded the company as Levitree while still a UC Berkeley undergraduate, 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, and reaching the finals of Berkeley’s Collider Cup entrepreneurship competition. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2024, at which point the company rebranded to Terranova and he moved into building it full-time, spending over a year testing robots and software at a pilot site before the company’s public launch — sleeping in trucks at the site during testing, by his own account (Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability).
Allen went on to begin a Master of Science in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, receiving support from Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program (STVP) on patent strategy for Terranova, before taking a leave of absence after the fall 2025 quarter to scale the company full-time following its seed round (Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability). In November 2025, Terranova emerged from stealth with a $7 million seed round, closed three times oversubscribed at a $25.1 million valuation and co-led by Outlander and Congruent Ventures, drawing coverage from TechCrunch, The Robot Report, and other outlets. In December 2025, Allen was named to Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” list in the Energy and Green Tech category (University of California).
Source Notes
This profile draws on contemporaneous reporting from TechCrunch and The Robot Report on Terranova’s founding and 2025 seed round, official founder-profile and press coverage from UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, and university press releases from the University of California and Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability confirming Allen’s 2026 Forbes “30 Under 30” recognition and Stanford graduate studies. His exact birth year and hometown neighborhood beyond San Rafael are not confirmed in available sources and have been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.