附近上门

, an imaging and AI-driven platform providing 360-degree visibility for construction sites, has raised $14 million in a Series A round led by .

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Other participants in the financing included a mix of institutional venture firms (, and ), the venture arm of commercial real estate brokerage () and a developer and construction company ( and ). Real estate developer and co-working giant also put money in the round.

WeWork and the participating construction company investors were all customers prior to backing OpenSpace, according to co-founder and CEO .

鈥淚n some ways, WeWork is very unique in the construction world, and in some ways they鈥檙e a glimpse into the future because the rate at which they are building is so fast and vast that they have to solve problems everyone else is coming up against, such as getting more work done with fewer people faster,鈥� he said.

Founded two years ago this month by grads, San Francisco-based OpenSpace uses patent-pending artificial intelligence to 鈥渁utomatically create navigable, 360-degree photo representations of any physical space.鈥�

鈥淲e鈥檙e using AI to augment workers鈥� capabilities by making documentation fast, easy and complete,鈥� Kalanithi said.

The financing marks the company鈥檚 first raise since it closed on a $3.5 million in September 2017. So far, the company鈥檚 technology has been used on projects valued at more than $50 billion on a combined basis, including currently at the Spiral, a three million square foot being developed by Tishman Speyer in New York City.

The way OpenSpace works is that builders attach a small camera to their hardhats and walk around a construction site. Its technology 鈥減assively captures鈥� imagery in the background. Per the company, that imagery data is then uploaded to the cloud, 鈥渨here OpenSpace鈥檚 algorithms map the photos to project plans and stitch them together, creating a visual representation of the site similar in style to Google Street View.鈥� The data then accumulates over time, so that builders have the ability to review site conditions from as little as a day before or as far back as years prior.

鈥淥penSpace makes it incredibly easy to walk a job site, gather detailed imagery and automatically generate a 360掳 view that’s pinned to the floor plan. What used to be a complex, laborious task is now a simple and elegant user experience,鈥� said David Gerster, vice president at JLL Spark, a venture fund launched by commercial real estate brokerage JLL last year.

OpenSpace claims that customers report its technology 鈥渁llows for 30x faster data capture compared to traditional, manual methods.鈥� I

Looking ahead, OpenSpace plans to use its new capital to scale its operations, with a particular focus on sales and marketing, as well as to develop new computer vision-powered products.

鈥淭he product we have today allows us to collect a massive amount of information and we want to take that to build products that can analyze that information and make the lives of our customers much more efficient and easier,鈥� Kalanithi told 附近上门 News.

In 2019, he projects the company will see revenue climb by 鈥渇our to five times鈥� compared to last year.

Background

OpenSpace鈥檚 founding team brings both a tech background and domain expertise to the table.

CEO Kalanithi sold his first company, , to where he eventually became president. More recently, he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at Lux Capital. Co-founder also helped form聽 a social TV analytics company.

OpenSpace has purposely chosen to work with investors who are directly involved in construction and real estate, Kalanithi said.

鈥淚n this industry in particular, it鈥檚 really important to have people that are users and customers deeply connected to the company itself,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 what their lives are every day.鈥�

Indeed, earlier today, we reported that , a venture firm with deep domain expertise, has closed on a $97.2 million fund to focus on construction tech investing. Its LPs are exclusively corporate strategics, or companies working in the industry in one form or another.

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