When I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, I had access to world-leading, next-generation data capture tools, including quadcopter and fixed-wing drones, Cessnas with sensor suites, satellite imagery, and persistent ground monitoring. It felt like I was living the future and I came away convinced of the potential for commercialization of these next-generation data capture tools.
Our company spent our first few years “building the haystack”— solving difficult technology problems to simply capture data so organizations could get a baseline for how they build, operate, and maintain their assets. Much of this work was performed by drones.
Our new direction is focused on global customers in energy and infrastructure who need to find the needles in their haystacks. We use whatever data capture method makes sense for them—drones, airplanes, and ground capture methods. Then we leverage our AI platform to analyze this data, making it simple to get answers about the state of assets across time, at scale. And at a speed necessary for smart decision-making.
We’re the market leader in advanced inspection software for the renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure sectors. Our daily work is delivering fast, accurate insights that help owners and operators save money, improve asset performance and longevity. Here are just two ways we’ve evolved to meet changing customer needs and the rapid, wholesale shift to an entirely new energy paradigm.
We developed the North American Solar Scan, the first-ever, objective, standardized rating system for large-scale solar assets. We are exploring expanding the scan to European countries including Germany and Italy, South American countries like Colombia and Brazil with fast-growing renewable energy markets, and Asia-Pacific countries like Australia and Japan.
We’ve built teams with expertise across all our customers’ asset classes. In renewable energy, more and more companies are hybrid operators with both wind and solar. They need help getting eyes on many interconnected parts: all the utility-scale power-generating equipment plus transmission lines, distribution lines and substations. Commercial and industrial property owners have rooftop solar or wind turbines to monitor. Our people have backgrounds in all these areas, as well as the necessary aviation, AI and data analytics know-how.
Our new name Zeitview shows we’ve moved well beyond presenting customers with a big data haystack for them to sift through. We’ve proved we can gather data fast and efficiently enough to matter. We’ve evolved from simple data capture work to AI-led analysis of solar utilities involving hundreds of thousands of solar arrays in remote locations. Now, job one is telling customers exactly where their problems are and how to fix them, over the full lifecycle of their assets.
Our approach has traction, as reflected by our recent $55M funding round, which brings our total raised to over $100M.
Like us, these investors believe energy is the economy for the foreseeable future. Drivers like the US Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Ukraine War, and Germany’s mandate to achieve 80% clean energy by 2030 are making renewables the greatest market opportunity of this generation. Globally, wind power is expected to grow at least 9% per year and solar at 7% from now until 2031.
We’re positioned to provide the surveying and monitoring needed as humanity moves from infrastructure to sustainable infrastructure, and from a fossil-fuel energy system to renewable energy. We are committed to this work over a time period measured in decades, to match (and extend!) the lifecycle of our customer’s assets (many of which will outlive us!)
I have a lot more to say about Zeitview’s new positioning, so stay tuned for more soon on our updated mission and vision, our value propositions, and our corporate values. And how they inform our roadmap to continued success.