Ahmed Shubber, a 25-year-old founder from Connecticut, wants to compete with the Caterpillars of the construction industry by building the Tesla of bulldozers.
Shubber’s company, Lumina, has been operating in stealth since 2021 and has since grown to a team of 26 people and raised an $8 million seed round, according to the founder.
On Wednesday, Shubber demonstrated Lumina’s first prototype, the Moonlander, in San Francisco.
In an interview with Business Insider, Shubber said he spent around $3 million building the all-electric, 32-ton bulldozer. The tractor was assembled in the UK, with parts coming in from nearly 200 different suppliers, he said.
David Wright, Lumina’s head of UK operations, told BI that the Moonlander has the same footprint as Caterpillar’s D6, a medium-sized bulldozer, but can push the same amount of load as a D9, a much larger tractor.
Wright said the blade attached to the Moonlander’s body at the Wednesday demonstration is the same size as the blade typically seen on a D9 tractor.
“A D6 could not push that blade,” he said. “We can have that blade full of material, full dozing seven to nine cubic meters of material, for eight to 10 hours.”
Wright said a charging station would be required on a project site.
“It can charge at 300 kilowatts, so we can go from zero to full in an hour and a quarter,” he said.
“Even if you spend all morning heavy dozing and you’re a bit worried about how much juice you’ve used — well, your operators are going to take a union-mandated lunch break, right? Plug it in, and in 30 minutes, you’ve put 50% of power back in again,” Wright said.
Shubber told BI that he’s taking the “Tesla approach” by building everything from the hardware and software stack in-house, including what Lumina hopes will be the Moonlander’s autonomous capabilities.
“If you look at every great company that’s tackling autonomy — Waymo, Tesla — they built their own hardware stack from scratch,” he said. “Waymo built all their sensors from scratch. Tesla built a car from scratch. And I think if we really want to have huge market penetration, I think you need to follow the same approach and not just slap on off-the-shelf parts.”
The Wednesday demonstration did not show the Moonlander operating independently, but Shubber said the bulldozer is equipped with Nvidia chips, so the Moonlander can be equipped with a full autonomous sensor suite when it’s ready.
Humble beginnings
Lumina’s origin has the inklings of the classic Silicon Valley startup story.
Shubber, who has no formal background in robotics or construction, told BI that he started his company inside his parents’ garage with a hand-me-down John Deere garden tractor. He said he got the equipment for free on Facebook Marketplace and retrofitted it with sensors himself to make it operate remotely.
For funding, Shubber said he messaged about 3,000 potential angel investors, and about 10 responded. His first angel investor was Peter Reinhardt, who sold his company Segment, a customer data management platform, to Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. Shubber said Reinhardt wrote him a $20,000 check, which allowed the founder to buy a skid steer tractor and automate it.
“Ahmed reached out to me years ago on Twitter which I usually ignore, but he was incredibly persistent and showing progress on an extraordinarily thin personal budget,” Reinhardt said in an email to BI. “It reminded me of hardware projects I had in college. Maybe a bit too much naive, confidence, and bravado, but I think I had that too … I figured he deserved a solid shot and I wrote him that first check.”
Reinhardt added that Shubber has made a lot of progress on the Moonlander and that the founder has a “massive vision.”
Shubber said he’s now looking to raise $20 million to $40 million for its Series A round. He said his revenue target in the next 24 months is $100 million.
Shubber said Lumina’s business model won’t be focused on selling equipment. Instead, it will be the company that performs the excavation on project sites. The start date goal is January 2026.
Shunner said Lumina’s next prototype is already in the works: a 100-ton electric excavator called Blade Runner.
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