“A lot of owners and operators of infrastructure have been seeing problems like aging and deterioration, extreme weather. Infrastructure is just changing so, so fast these days, and the way that we can continue to stay on top of a lot of these big challenges is with better data and better maps in the first place,” he said.
Mach9 originally pursued a hardware play; the aim was to develop mobile mapping systems and collect the geospatial data themselves by putting lidar and imaging payloads on top of vehicles. The company was accepted to Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort and raised $2.5 million later that year. But many OEMs are already building great equipment to generate maps, and after talking to customers, Baikovitz said the company realized that the bigger problem was how to turn all all that mapping data into insights.