Bricks & Bytes has published a detailed profile of OpenSpace CEO Jeevan Kalanithi, tracing how a commitment to listening to builders turned an early prototype into a spatial AI platform now valued at $902 million. The piece covers the founding story of OpenSpace, from a clunky workflow running on just two job sites to more than 40 billion square feet of jobsite imagery captured across 94 countries, along with the founder lessons behind that growth. For construction leaders thinking about where spatial AI fits in their technology stack, it is a candid and insightful read.
The Bricks & Bytes feature captures something central to why OpenSpace was built the way it was: the belief that construction teams trust pictures over documents, and that any technology adding steps to a busy person’s day will fail on the job site. OpenSpace was designed from the beginning to remove friction rather than introduce it. A worker clips a 360 camera to a hardhat, walks the site as they normally would, and the software handles the rest automatically. That design direction came directly from feedback on a Berkeley job site, where a project manager told the early team their capture process would never see adoption. It remains at the core of a platform now operating across 94 countries. As spatial AI moves further into scheduling, productivity analysis, and precise indoor issue detection, that founding principle still applies: the best technology on a job site is the one that feels like less work, not more.
The profile also sheds light on where OpenSpace is heading next. With the November 2025 acquisition of Disperse and the development of features like Auto Location, which estimates indoor position without GPS, the platform is moving from documentation toward active intelligence. Jeevan describes a future where a junior superintendent can ask a question from inside a specific room and receive back the relevant issues, the right contact to resolve them, and the full plan history of that space. That kind of capability matters deeply for an industry facing a serious labor shortage, where augmenting field staff with better information could have the same effect as adding years of experience to every person on site. OpenSpace is at the center of that shift, and the Bricks & Bytes feature offers an accessible entry point for any construction team ready to understand what is now possible.
By: Owen Drury
