SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 8, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Enview, a provider of 3D geospatial data analytics, today announced that it has raised a $6 million Series A round of financing led by Crosslink Capital. Lemnos, Promus Ventures, and Skype co-founder Toivo Annus also participated in the round. Matt Bigge, Partner, Crosslink Capital and Helen Boniske, Partner, Lemnos joined Enview’s Board of Directors.

“Enview is building the most powerful 3D computer vision platform the world has ever seen and we’re doing it for a very specific purpose—to protect energy infrastructure and keep people safe,” said San Gunawardana, Co-founder and CEO, Enview. “Society depends on a vast network of power lines, pipes, and cables. Damage to this infrastructure results in explosions, fires, blackouts, and ecological contamination. This new round of capital will help us scale deployment of our technology to meet demand from some of North America’s largest pipeline and power line operators to enhance safety and reliability.”

According to 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. has an energy transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure that includes over 7.2 million miles of electric power lines and 2.6 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines. However, it is also rapidly aging, highly vulnerable, and requires significant effort to operate safely and reliability. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America a D+ on its 2017 Energy Infrastructure Report Card. Major portions were designed and built in the 1950s with a 50-year life-expectancy. The grid is also highly vulnerable to extreme weather events such as storms, and floods, as well as human activity. For example, a dry, weakened tree branch could fall onto a power line. Or, an unknowing construction team could be digging dangerously close to an underground natural gas pipeline.

Helping the energy industry see the invisible to enhance safety and reliability
Enview’s geospatial analytics technology automatically processes nation-scale datasets to generate actionable insights in a timeframe that is orders of magnitude faster than prior methods. Enview’s technology is increasingly becoming more important to operators looking to enhance the safety and reliability of their energy infrastructure.

Previously, energy operators and the geospatial analytics industry have relied on two-dimensional (2D) data sources (e.g., satellite and aerial imagery) to try to see the three-dimensional world we live in. This yields low-accuracy measurements and allows threats to go undetected. 3D data is generated with high-frequency laser scans, using a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor, and is much more accurate and can detect things that are invisible in 2D data. However, 3D data is much harder to analyze and 2D computer vision algorithms are fundamentally incapable of processing it. Therefore, it is typically analyzed by hand; a slow, expensive, and error-prone process. This has limited the use of 3D data to applications such as defense and high-voltage transmission power lines.

Enview’s platform solves that problem by using massively-parallel cloud computing (cutting large problems into small pieces and using thousands of processors to solve them at the same time), 3D computer vision, and deep learning/artificial intelligence to enable a general leap forward in geospatial analytics capability.

“The geospatial analytics market is projected to grow from $31 billion in 2016 to $74 billion by 2021,” said Matt Bigge, Partner, Crosslink Capital. “The Enview team brings years of experience, thought leadership, and boots-on-ground deployment of geospatial big data to support safety critical operations. They’ve built a compelling solution to help the energy industry protect its critical infrastructure and keep people safe, and I believe other industries will find great value in Enview’s geospatial analytics platform as well.”

About Enview
Enview, Inc. automates geospatial big data for the energy industry to enhance the safety, reliability, and compliance of pipeline and power line operations. Enview combines expertise in remote sensing, computer vision and geospatial big data to allow operators to see the invisible and use today’s data to predict future threats. The company was incorporated in 2015 and is based in San Francisco, California.

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SOURCE Enview