OpenSpace is growing (fast)
I am proud to share that we’ve recently raised our Series C.
The total new funding is exciting: a little more than $55,000,000, with great partners joining our team.
As I sat to write down this blog post — saying my thank you’s, sharing thoughts about what we’ve done so far — I re-read a blog post I wrote after our Series A. I was surprised — and pleased — to see that the ideas we articulated back then still hold true today — except even more so, and at a grander scale.
Those thoughts are worth sharing again in an updated, more precise form, hopefully with a new and broader audience.
So instead of writing something from scratch, I decided to simply rewrite and update that older post, and share it here. I hope it is useful reading.
I am proud to announce that OpenSpace has partnered with some of the world’s best, biggest technology investors and real estate and construction companies, as we close our $55,000,000 Series C. Proud, to be sure, but also grateful.
Thank you’s
First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who decided to take a risk and join the team at OpenSpace. You are the company, quite literally. There is nothing without you, and you are why we are here today. A deep thank you to our Marcus McMorris, who was key to our company. You are gone but not forgotten.
Equal thanks to all our customers and users: we exist solely for your benefit. We are grateful you took a chance on us early, and we’re proud to help you get things done.
Thank you to the team at Lux Capital, especially Bilal Zuberi, for welcoming me as Lux’s first Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and for giving Michael, Philip and me the freedom to explore. You’ve supported us since Day 1 — through our Seed and A rounds and beyond.
Thank you to the team at Menlo Ventures, especially Shawn Carolan, who led our Series B and helped us accelerate our growth substantially in the past year. The whole team at Menlo has helped us so much, across the board.
Thank you to our existing investor partners, many of whom started off as customers: JLL Spark, Navitas Capital, Suffolk Construction, Tishman Speyer, NineFour Ventures, The Taronga Group/RealTechX, and Zigg Capital. OpenSpace exists to simplify the lives of your workforces and the workforces you represent, and your support means a lot. Thanks also to our seed investors who helped launch us on this journey: our angel investors (including Tracy Young and Ralph Gootee of PlanGrid, among many others), Lux Capital, Foundation Capital, Sterling, Baidu, Box, and the National Science Foundation.
Thank you to our new strategic partners, all of whom are CEO’s, leaders and investors at some of the most influential global construction, development and investment firms out there: Momei Qu and Penny Pritzker of PSP Partners, Ryan Shmeizer and Chris Green of Greenpoint, Ben Cheng and Jeff Leung at New World Development, Andy Leek and Joe McKee of Paric Construction, Jim Donaghy of StructureTone/STO, Grant McCullagh of Thornton Tomasetti and Cyrus Izzo of Syska Hennessy.
And last and certainly not least: thank you to the team at Alkeon Capital, especially Mark McLaughlin, who saw in our past performance and future potential a company that was not just growing, not just achieving escape velocity, but a company that can be an enduring partner for the world’s builders for decades to come. We are proud to have you as Series C lead investors.
How’d we get here?
How did we get here? In the case of OpenSpace, our story isn’t that complicated. There was a literal “a-ha” moment — no joke. I can simply tell you exactly what happened, where we are today, and at least hint at where we are going.
OpenSpace brings together a few observations.
First, we have a deep empathy for builders of physical stuff. I’ve personally been through the pain (and joy) of making real-world objects at both my first company and at 3D Robotics, the company that acquired us. We built a lot of hardware at both companies. We also built a software product for construction called Site Scan, in partnership with Autodesk. Throughout our work with Site Scan, we did our best to better understand the lives of the builders for whom the product was designed. I learned a lot, and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more we could do to make the lives of all kinds of people who work in the real, physical world — especially the men and women of the construction industry — a little easier and a little better.
Manufacturing is hard, I know that firsthand. From my experience at companies past and present, I know that construction is 10X harder.
But it’s not just about my personal wish to make a difference here. As a society, we really don’t have a choice. Our second observation is that the construction and real estate industries are at a critical point, and winners will separate themselves by evolving — whereas losers will be those that don’t change.
Why is there a need for change?
We’re facing many deep and intertwined problems, from the lack of affordable housing to a breakdown in critical transportation infrastructure, and it’s clear that building will be an important part of the solution. But while the list of projects that need to be done is growing, the number of people we have to do this work is shrinking. The U.S. alone has lost 1 million construction workers since 2008.
This affects us all, and we have to find more creative solutions. Luckily, there are two mutually-reinforcing technology trends that can be used to help tackle the problems I’ve described above.
Our third observation: cameras are becoming ubiquitous. To co-opt (and perhaps butcher) a phrase my former 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson: “There are many peace dividends of the smartphone war.” One of these dividends is the ever-increasing power of camera technologies. Because of the heavy investment into smartphone cameras, all kinds of cameras are getting better and smaller, and can find their way into more places than ever before.
If you can put a camera where there wasn’t one before, there’s probably a business in there somewhere. Camera drones, doorbell cams — they are all part of this trend.
Fourth, computer vision systems are getting smarter. Investments in self-driving cars, autonomy, robotics and AI mean that we are building software that is getting better and better at parsing the physical environment based on video feeds and image data. The amount of images and video being generated by all these cameras is too much for a single person to make sense out of, but machine vision systems can sort, organize and compress this information into useful insights. This, in turn, helps people understand situations better and solve problems more efficiently.
All of the above observations are true. We knew that if we could harness these emerging technologies and apply them to pain points we saw in the building industry, we had the potential to create something really useful. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words — imagery data can provide an unbiased source of truth about a physical reality. But it’s 100% false to say Mike, Philip and I outlined these as axioms on a whiteboard one day, convinced ourselves they made sense in theory, and then started the company.
There was a lot more trial and error than that.
Tech companies typically fail not because they can’t get their tech to work, but because they build something that no one wants. Knowing this, it was important to try out ideas and bootstrap before committing to go all-in. It also helps to go with what you know: we had gotten to know a number of builders at 3D Robotics, we knew their pains, and they were nice enough to let us try out our early ideas on their sites. In particular, I am grateful to WEST Builders, Palisades and Lendlease for giving us this opportunity.
About that a-ha moment: I can remember very clearly testing our tool one day on a site overseen by Nick Mirkovich, a PM at WEST Builders (he’s now a VP!). At that time, we had built a tool that could deliver something like the full visual record you see in our product today, but the imagery capture was a very manual process. I had used our software around Nick’s site right before a concrete pour, and showed him the results in the trailer. His first reaction was positive: he never had a record of what was under the concrete if any issues came up after the pour (and he had certainly seen his fair share of costly issues).
But, being a good PM — focused on cost, labor and schedule — he immediately asked me how long it took me to collect all those images. The truth was, it took a long time, because our tool at that point was pretty manual, and collecting the data was a time-consuming task.
Nick and his team don’t have time for new tasks. They, like the whole industry, are stretched thin enough already.
After I told Nick how long it took me to capture his site, Nick paused for a moment.
Then, he said, “You know, if you can take that camera, make it smaller, and just put it on my, Travis’ and Bryan’s hardhats…we walk the site to make sure everything is going according to plan. That’s our job. If your little cameras could be ‘on’ while we did that, and if you could somehow take all those videos and turn that into what you are showing me here…well, we would buy that.”
A-ha!
Nick, I don’t know if you remember that day, but it was the literal a-ha moment for us. I knew intellectually that great products remove work for their users, they don’t add it. But Nick made it crystal clear that while this data was massively useful, it had to be incredibly easy — zero labor, even — to collect.
The technology to take a random string of images and accurately geolocate them, with no input from the user and no reliance on GPS or other external signals, is technically quite difficult. Creating a system that is reliable, fast and accurate presents a real computer vision challenge. Luckily, we specialize in solving them.
Since that day, we’ve focused on making SIMPLE, EASY, FAST tools that are backed by powerful technology, designed to make builders’ lives easier. And I am happy to say that we have been growing very rapidly. Our team is now a mix of construction industry veterans (much of the team comes from industry, some with decades of experience) and some of the smartest computer vision and technology people out there.
From starting the company in August 2017 to coming out of stealth summer of 2018 (thanks in particular to Darin Peters at Hathaway Dinwiddie and Lincoln Wood of Turner for taking a chance on us while we were in stealth), we’ve done a lot.
We are now deployed on many, many thousands of projects globally. Our tool is becoming part of customers’ daily workflows. We enable them to create “high frequency digital twins” of their job sites, making things like coordination, dispute resolution, and future renovations smoother and more efficient.
In the near future, buildings will have records of themselves that can be queried and explored just as easily as we search the web. We’re excited to be part of that.
Back when we started the company, I used to say, “I’m confident that in 5–10 years, having the type of user experience we provide will be absolutely standard on construction sites.” I now think that day is now only a year or two away — and for many, that day has already come. The pandemic has been a horrible thing to endure, and it has hit the fast forward button on a lot of us, as we adapt and evolve how we get things done. Tools like Zoom saw massive growth over the past year — and so did OpenSpace.
Once you can do something more quickly, more conveniently, more efficiently — you don’t go back.
What’s next?
So what’s next? Well, suffice to say we didn’t start OpenSpace with just our current product in mind. Great companies are stories told through a series of products and product families, and I’m proud to say we have made good on writing more than one chapter in our story. And we have a lot of ideas in the works.
I will say this: the amount of data our customers are collecting is staggering. To date, we have collected 3.7B square feet of imagery data — enough to fill the Empire State Building more than 1,200 times. As of last year, we were adding 20M sq ft per month. That has since doubled to 40M per month, and is sure to keep on growing.
We’re quite confident we have the best technology team out there, the best team to build products our customers will love, and the best team to get those products in our customers’ hands. We feel like our past performance has shown this, and the Series C will help us double down on that promise.
We’ve done a lot over the past couple years. A few highlights:
- Our tech is even faster than before: our processing times are lightning quick. After someone walks the job and uploads the video to our cloud, we on average have a result back in 15 minutes — not the hours or days of older or competing technologies.
- We released a completely free product, OpenSpace Photo, so builders of all kinds can have access to complete visual documentation.
- We expanded our integrations with platforms provided by companies like Procore and Autodesk, simplifying workflows for all our customers.
- We’ve incorporated BIM into the platform, making it easy for everyone — including but not only VDC experts — to quickly see if reality is going according to plan.
- We’ve enhanced our Field Note capabilities to help our customers quickly identify issues, share them in an easy to understand photo, and then validate they have been fixed.
We also launched ClearSight, a suite of AI-powered tools that take laborious, error-prone but absolutely critical tasks and make them simple, fast and trusted. Our AI’s can quantify what builders do, letting builders focus on creating and maintaining awesome spaces. I’m proud of Progress Tracking in particular, as it represents not just groundbreaking technology, but a welcome and transformative way to maintain schedule and get paid on time.
We are going to incorporate even more ways to capture visual data. In particular, we are going to leverage the mobile phones we all have in our pockets, even more deeply, by allowing our customers to use the new LIDAR scanner in the iPhone to capture spaces so that they can snap measurements all within our platform.
There is so much more to do with ClearSight, to make it more comprehensive and powerful for all our customers. We want to be as valuable to our customers as possible. And we have so many more customers we can serve — the trades, general contractors, owners — and even folks who serve these companies, such as lenders and insurers. We know that if a project is getting built — anywhere in the world — it can benefit from OpenSpace. And we want to be there, if we can. We’re going to keep building our team to make that happen.
And, of course, we’ve got more up our sleeve we’re not quite ready to share. :)
So, thank you all for helping us get this far. It’s a good time to take a breath, look back at how far we’ve climbed, and head up to higher heights.
