FREDERICTON – 3D Planeta has raised $1-million in seed investment following its recent funding round with Halifax-based Concrete Ventures and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.
The funding will help the company, which specializes in 3D geographic visualization, develop its cloud-based SaaS product called NAVEC.
Norm Couturier, the president and CEO of 3D Planeta, says that the company is grateful for the funding and will allow them to round out the engineering team.
“It’s going to allow us to build our software engineering and geomatics engineering teams, bringing in the senior skill sets that we’ve been looking to put on the team,” he said in an interview.
“Some of it is going to be for expanding doing our direct marketing, business development, and expanding our customer base, but predominantly to get our engineering teams built out.”
The technology is used to fuse images from aircrafts, UAVs, satellites, along with lidar and sonic imaging to generate a 3D visualization across all of earth’s terrain, including underwater. The images are combined with data from other existing geographic information systems to include weather information, streets, buildings, and other elements.
“We’ve been at this for about a year and a half and we’ve been pre-invested,” said Couturier. “The team has been small, we spent a lot of energy on business development, market validation, getting that customer fit, really honing down on our value proposition and laying out the groundwork for a lot of our final product development.”
The company says they are expecting to have NAVEC fully in-market by early next year.
The product is expected to benefit professionals in land exploration, emergency response, and defence and security. The 3D visualization could help those people make quick, safe decisions in the field.
“Until today, scalable and on-demand 3D imagery from any aerial source was not feasible for many decision-makers,” said Patrick Hankinson, Partner at Concrete Ventures in a statement.
“The team at 3D Planeta has built a truly innovative technology platform to give industries the true three-dimensional data they need to gain new insights not traditionally available through 2D or simulated 3D data.”
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