Clean water, safe roads, accessible broadband and electricity: these are things we cannot take for granted. They rely on vast infrastructure networks that must be continually maintained and improved to function. America has largely failed on this front. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country's aging infrastructure a dismal “C-” in its latest report card.
According to Mach9, a startup founded in 2021, part of the solution lies in giving infrastructure providers better information about the physical world. The company uses AI to convert mobile LIDAR (light detection and ranging, an imaging technology) scans into 2D and 3D engineering models at a fraction of the cost and time of standard processes. This helps power companies, engineering companies, construction companies and others make timely progress on large infrastructure projects, know where to direct capital for upgrades, and learn more about the assets they manage. It means to be able to understand or be able to understand.
The company's flagship product, Digital Surveyor, can also automatically identify more than 20 features such as utility poles, traffic lights, and road signs. Currently, these features are manually identified by human operators. Mach9's customers include major infrastructure providers and engineering services companies in the United States and Canada, including Michael Baker International, POWER Engineers, Langan, and Fibersmith.
Mach9 co-founder and CEO Alexander Bykovits said he got into the field while attending Carnegie Mellon University. As a student researcher in robotics, he worked on infrastructure projects such as the decontamination of legacy nuclear facilities for the U.S. Department of Energy, and said, “Many of the robotics problems we were solving were actually complex for full-scale surveying. I realized that it was a mapping problem. That means even if you're equipped with the best robots to step into radiation-filled facilities like the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington state, you still don't have hard data on what's where and what's going on. Without it, infrastructure projects are often abandoned in the first place. The state they are in.
“Many infrastructure owners and operators are faced with challenges such as aging, deterioration, and extreme weather. Infrastructure is changing so rapidly these days that it is difficult to stay on top of many of these big challenges. “The way we can continue to do that is first with better data and better maps,” he said.
Mach9 originally pursued hardware play. The objective was to develop a mobile mapping system and collect geospatial data itself by mounting LIDAR and image payloads on top of vehicles. The company was accepted into Y Combinator's summer 2021 cohort and raised $2.5 million later that year. But many OEMs have already built better equipment for generating maps, and after talking with customers, the company realized the bigger problem is how to turn all that map data into insights. Bykovitz said he noticed that.
“Most people take for granted/do not understand how difficult it is to keep infrastructure up to date with a changing world,” he said. That's where digital surveyors come in.
Mach9 co-founders (left to right): Haowen Shi, Alexander Baikovitz, Zachary Sussman, Michael Mong
Mach9 currently sells Digital Surveyor software to engineering consultants, public and private infrastructure owners, and operators to help them turn their data into insights. For example, you can identify all the utility poles in a large power company network. It often takes 2 to 4 days per mile of map to locate all features. With Digital Surveyor, it takes a human less than 10 minutes per mile to review and verify software labels.
Digital Surveyor not only identifies features but also provides more detailed information about them. Mr. Bykovitz led a product demo and explained how Digital Surveyor not only identifies a utility pole, but also immediately tells you the angle at which the pole is tilted. This feature is critical in situations where people need information quickly, such as after extreme weather events, Bykovitz said.
The company recently closed a $12 million seed round led by Quiet Capital, Overmatch Ventures, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, former Autodesk CEO Omar Hanspal, Adobe CPO Scott Belsky, former DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram, and others. New and existing investors participated. The company plans to expand its team of 14 people and build the software, including adding more identifiable objects. The goal is to go from being able to automatically identify about 20 different features today to “hundreds or even thousands” of features in the future, Bykovitz said. .