Good afternoon, everyone - Back-to-back deal days for you. We aren’t in the dog days of summer just yet.

I’m shippin upta Boston tonight for an annual trip with my buddies from BC. We’ll be driving up to Portland, Maine, tomorrow. I’ve been a few times and couldn’t be more excited. If anyone has any recommendations, send them my way.

With that said, let’s dive into what I think is a very fascinating deal, especially since this company is aiming to solve a problem I see a lot, given the fact I’m living on an island off the coast of Miami: flooding.

To that end, we’re excited to share an opportunity to invest in Terranova - the company terraforming Earth to defend it against flooding. (Intro Video).

Backed by top climate funds and Palmer Luckey (Anduril co-founder), Terranova is the first company capable of raising inhabited land from below, with no demolition and no relocation. Using autonomous robots and subsurface biomass injection, it can geologically elevate entire neighborhoods, cities, and coastlines.

One robotic fleet lifts an acre by a foot per day at roughly 1/10th the cost of conventional fill, and a fraction of the cost of every other alternative. For the hundreds of millions of people living on sinking land as oceans rise, cities and towns that were destined to drown can now be lifted.

Flooding is one of the most expensive unsolved problems on the planet. It costs the US economy over $180B each year, with over $68B required annually for infrastructure upgrades. Entire FEMA flood zones sit frozen out of the market, hundreds of US military bases face sea-level rise, and roughly 300 million people globally are projected to face routine flooding by 2050.

Every expensive legacy countermeasure (seawalls, levees, imported fill, managed retreat) either fights the water at the surface or abandons the land entirely. None addresses the underlying subsidence. Terranova attacks the problem at its geological root, re-engineering the ground itself beneath everything already standing on it.

The company is raising a small, opportunistic round ahead of a larger Series A later this year. This round is for a few select insiders and strategics.

Terranova's last priced round was co-led by Outlander VC and Congruent Ventures (SF Based Climate Fund), with participation from Galvanize Climate (Tom Steyer's climate fund), Gothams (emergency response and disaster logistics contractor, run by special ops and Army Corps veterans), and angels including Anduril founder Palmer Luckey.

If you'd like access to the NDA-gated data room and deal link, you can send me a text or reply to [email protected].

We have also included some very helpful videos below to help you better get up to speed in understanding the technology

Q&A Call: 

We are hosting a Q&A Call with CEO and Founder Laurence Allen at 2 PM ET on Friday July 10th. If you are interested in attending, please also let us know.

As always, I’d like to remind you to keep the contents of these emails strictly confidential. Please do not contact the company or affiliated parties as these emails are not meant to be shared with anyone outside of this list. Anyone found doing so will be removed.

Important: If you received this email, you responded to our survey indicating that you are an Accredited Investor and/or Qualified Purchaser. This memo and its contents are strictly confidential and should only be viewed by express invitation by its author(s). It contains potential investment information that may only be viewed by invitees who qualify as Accredited Investors as defined by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. If you have received this memo by mistake, or do not meet the qualifications of an Accredited Investor or Qualified Purchaser, please stop reading and disregard this memo immediately.

Terranova has pioneered a new category of flood-risk mitigation: subsurface terrain elevation. The company deploys car-sized autonomous robots that drill shallow injection wells and pump an engineered slurry of wood chips, water, and thickening agent into the substrate. Subterranean apertures open and fill, gently raising the overlying soil, while the wood chips compact under the weight of the earth above into a stable, load-bearing matrix similar to particle board.

Real-time robotic surveying and AI-driven controls hold elevation to millimeter-level precision. Because the deep subsurface is anoxic and microbially inactive, the buried biomass resists decay on a millennium timescale, the same geotechnical principle behind the 4-foot wood-chip layer under the Alaskan highway system and the 15-foot layer under the Dumbarton Bridge embankment.

One robotic fleet lifts an acre by a foot per day at roughly 1/10th the cost of conventional fill, and a fraction of the cost of every other alternative: rebuilding a deficient levee runs $50M+ per mile, and US seawall needs could exceed $400B. The feedstock is wood waste that cities currently pay to dispose of, and every project permanently sequesters carbon underground, an additional revenue line not yet monetized.

The technology stack spans the full project lifecycle: a site suitability predictor based on soil composition and flood risk, AI/ML reasoning models that design each injection campaign, and closed-loop control of semi-autonomous injection rovers that holds the finished surface topology to millimeter-level precision. 

The model is asset-light with strong per-project economics. Terranova licenses hardware and software to capital partners who fund and own the projects while the company retains all IP, protected by issued US and European patents with filings on five continents. The company has already signed a JV with a multi-billion dollar private equity firm that is funding the fleet buildout and anchoring a multi-project commercial pilot, alongside teaming agreements with federal contractors.

The applications extend far beyond flood defense - the same technology is an engine for land value creation, lifting uninsurable parcels out of FEMA flood zones into buildable real estate and reclaiming land that sits below sea level.

The addressable US opportunity runs into the trillions of dollars across highways, railways, levees, new development, substations, defense installations, agriculture, wetlands restoration, and airports. The federal pathway is advancing: the company is advised by a former senior commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers, legislative efforts are underway to formally evaluate the method, and federal pilot funding has already been appropriated.

Internationally, the opportunities are also endless. The demand signal is global and sovereign-scale: cities like Jakarta, the most populous urban region on earth, are sinking so fast that Indonesia is spending $30B+ to relocate its capital, while its only alternative is a decades-debated sea wall program costing tens of billions. The company has already received interest from countries like Indonesia to license the technology for the whole city.

For governments whose current options are building a colossal wall or abandoning the land, Terranova offers a third path: lift the city instead.

Terranova has completed a successful California demonstration under state water board oversight, with groundwater returning cleaner than baseline, and its first commercial deployment in the San Francisco Bay Area is permitting now. The first flagship municipal target is San Rafael, where press has reported a ~$92M Terranova scope replacing $500-900M in seawall estimates.

Laurence Allen (CEO) former engineering on SpaceX's Dragon, Raptor, and Starship Booster programs before turning down a return offer to found Terranova.

Trip Allen (Co-Founder & Chairman) is a former NASA and Dow Chemical engineer who previously raised $150M+ scaling MBA Polymers across three continents.

We rarely see this combination at this early a stage: a working technology attacking a multi-trillion-dollar problem with no direct competitor, a SpaceX-caliber founding team, an asset-light model that scales on partner capital, and a cap table that spans climate and defense. We're excited to share this one and look forward to discussing it with you.

Three helpful videos to get you up to speed

High Level Short Video to get you started - Science, Startups, and Stories Profile

In depth 1 Hour Podcast (1) - Relentless Podcast

In depth 1 Hour Podcast (2) - The Startup Lifting Cities Podcast

If you'd like to receive the NDA gated data room, deal link, and Q&A Call invite, please send me a text or email.