Laurence Allen is co-founder and CEO of Terranova, a robotics startup that raises sinking land to fight flooding. He grew up in San Rafael, California, and started the company to protect his hometown from sea level rise. Terranova's tracked robots drill wells and inject a wood slurry underground, guided by software that models injection patterns from geographic data and core samples. The approach can lift land in weeks instead of years, at a fraction of the cost of seawalls. The company raised $7 million in seed funding in November 2025.