OpenSpace announces new strategic partnerships to help bring "Street View"-style documentation to construction sites

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Aug. 13, 2019 – OpenSpace, the leader in 360° construction site data capture and analysis, today announced a $14M Series A funding round led by Lux Capital. Returning investor Goldcrest Capital also joined the round, along with new participants JLL Spark, Navitas Capital, Suffolk Construction, Tishman Speyer, WeWork and Zigg Capital. With these new investors onboard, OpenSpace has established strategic partnerships with some of the top names in real estate and construction. Founded in 2017, OpenSpace is deployed on projects exceeding $50B in total value in the United States and around the world.

OpenSpace uses patent-pending, cutting-edge artificial intelligence to automatically create navigable, 360° photo representations of any physical space. Builders attach a small camera to their hardhats and walk the site as normal, with OpenSpace passively capturing imagery in the background. Imagery data is then uploaded to the cloud, where OpenSpace’s 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. This data then accumulates over time, providing builders with a “time machine” that allows them to review site conditions as they were a day ago, a week ago or years ago. With OpenSpace, project stakeholders can conduct virtual site tours, communicate easily about change orders, and review the photo record to see changes over time.

“OpenSpace makes it incredibly easy to walk a job site, gather detailed imagery and automatically generate a 360° view that's pinned to the floor plan. What used to be a complex, laborious task is now a simple and elegant user experience,” said David Gerster, Vice President at JLL Spark. “This investment is part of our broader commitment to transforming commercial real estate with new technology."

On average, customers report that OpenSpace allows for 30x faster data capture compared to traditional, manual methods. It requires no specialized training to use and works with an off-the-shelf 360° camera. Using OpenSpace, customers have already captured more than 150M square feet of data—enough to fill more than 50 Empire State Buildings—and that number continues to grow.

“Tishman Speyer has piloted OpenSpace at MIRA in San Francisco and now at our ongoing construction of the Spiral, a three million square foot development in New York City, and we see value in scaling this program more broadly,” said Jenny Wong, Managing Director at Tishman Speyer. “Access to accurate, immediate data is essential in the development and building process, and we are excited to be partnering with OpenSpace.”

“OpenSpace’s imaging and AI analytics platform is seeing rapid adoption by some of the largest infrastructure and real estate development firms, who are also investing in the company,” said Bilal Zuberi, Partner at Lux Capital. “We are excited to continue to partner with OpenSpace in building a great infrastructure analytics company.”

“At OpenSpace, we’re using AI to augment workers’ capabilities by making documentation fast, easy and complete,” said Jeevan Kalanithi, co-founder and CEO of OpenSpace. “We started this company by collaborating with builders, on their job sites. We knew that any documentation solution needed to be totally passive in order to fit into the extremely busy day-to-day of a construction site, and this is what inspired us to create OpenSpace’s unique tap-and-go approach.”

The company plans to use the funding to continue scaling up its operations, including sales and marketing expansion, as well as for development of new computer vision powered products that leverage the massive, unique and growing dataset being created. For more information and to read customer testimonials, visit https://openspace.ai/.

OpenSpace is a construction tech company using artificial intelligence to automatically create navigable, 360° photo representations of job sites. Builders simply attach an off-the-shelf 360° camera to their hardhat and walk the site as normal, with OpenSpace handling image capture. After the data is uploaded to the cloud, OpenSpace’s algorithms automatically map the images against a site plan, organizing them and then stitching them together to create a photo representation that can be navigated and compared over time. On average, customers report that OpenSpace allows for 30x faster data capture compared to traditional, manual methods, allowing them to document sites more frequently and more completely. The company was founded in 2017 is headquartered in San Francisco, California.