If you haven’t visited the 3DR website recently, you might be surprised to find the Site Scan product splashed all over the front page. For a company that rose to prominence on the back of the Solo consumer drone, this focus on an enterprise solution for a cloud-based 3D mapping service for UAVs represents a significant change.
And the front page isn’t the only sign of a pivot. Late last month, 3DR announced a $53 million Series D funding round to build “our flagship product, Site Scan.”
The funding, which includes further investment from the Autodesk Forge Fund, represents a new focus on AEC enterprise solutions. In an official statement, 3DR describes Site Scan as a tool for construction teams to perform fast, automated reality capture from a drone to “monitor and report on progress, identify issues, [and]collect useful actionable data.”
Site Scan, which was developed on Autodesk’s Forge platform and uses the ReCap engine for processing imagery, boasts easy integration with Autodesk products. Users can lay hi-res imagery and data sets from Site Scan over as-designed models in a number of Autodesk’s BIM solutions.
According to 3DR, this integration with Autodesk products is just a taste of what’s to come. “We have already harnessed the power of the Forge platform to build key features for Site Scan,” the company explains in an official statement, “and will continue to utilize Forge to accelerate product development and deepen workflow integrations with Autodesk products.”
