Year in Review: Our Top 5 Highlights of 2022
December 9, 2022
From new customer relationships to funding announcements to international awards, this past year has been a fruitful one for us at OpenSpace, with opportunities for growth, innovation, and deeper connection with our community. As 2022 comes to a close, we wanted to reflect on some of our most notable moments of this past year as we look forward to what the new year will bring. Here are our top 5 highlights of 2022.
1. Convening our global community at Waypoint and Waypoint city tours
In October, we hosted our second annual virtual customer summit, Waypoint 2022, where nearly 400 construction professionals joined us to learn how OpenSpace helps companies build with certainty in an uncertain world. This year’s event featured exciting product announcements and helpful insights from leaders at OpenSpace and our customers on how to get the most value from our technology.
We were pleased to announce new integrations with Insta 360’s latest cameras, the One RS 1-inch 360 edition and the Insta 360 X3, as well as our plan for launching background uploads for mobile—which will enable builders to focus on the job at hand rather than on uploading videos. Additional sessions provided valuable best practices from OpenSpace power users at Broccolini Construction and Power Design, Inc., and participants also heard from contech leaders who shared their perspectives and insights on the future of the industry.
Since Waypoint has become a global event, with this year’s attendees joining us everywhere from the U.S. to New Zealand, we also decided to take our act on the road with a new series of Waypoint City Tours, bringing the spirit of Waypoint to customers across the globe. Featuring networking opportunities and customer-led discussions on strategies for building and the future of construction technology, we loved being able to connect in person with the global OpenSpace Community, from Tokyo and Toronto to New York City and London. We also visited several cities for happy hours and other events across the U.S. to continue the conversation with members of the OpenSpace Community.
2. Being named the official reality capture platform of the U.S. GSA’s Public Buildings Service
This year, we were honored to be selected, alongside JLL Technologies, as the enterprise-wide image capture solution of choice by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service. This selection demonstrates that reliable reality capture is moving from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have in order to improve efficiency on all types of jobsites. We’re proud to have been chosen through an open bidding process by the GSA to meet that need.
With this contract, we are providing our technology to more than 8,000 government properties nationwide across all 11 GSA regions, as well as working toward authorization under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a government-wide security standard for cloud-based services. This designation will enable us to continue supporting teams on major government projects moving forward.
3. Delivering continuous product innovation
At OpenSpace, we’re focused on providing multiple ways for builders to take advantage of reality capture while continuously improving our powerful solutions to deliver the fastest, easiest, and most reliable platform on the market. To stay true to our core value of simplifying everything, we renamed ClearSight Progress Tracking to “OpenSpace Track” this year to reflect how it was most commonly described on jobsites. As we continue to grow and innovate, we are excited to see OpenSpace Track and OpenSpace Capture being used in multiple capacities in a variety of use cases, whether that’s flying drones for full-site capture or using site records to reduce insurance premiums. As cameras continue to develop, we’re adding support for any way our customers want to capture—whether using 360° cameras, mobile phone LiDAR scans, robots, or drones. If you can attach a camera to it, you can capture with it using OpenSpace.
Looking forward, we’re eager for new features such as background uploads for mobile, double-layer drywall tracking, Sheet Overlay in BIM Compare, and Safety and Environmental tags in Field Notes. These new features will further enable builders to focus on the jobsite and use 360° video footage to make real-time comparisons.
4. Receiving global recognition
OpenSpace is currently being used on projects in 91 countries around the world, and that number is continuously growing. As we expand our global coverage, it’s an honor to have been awarded Best Contech Company 2022 at the Real Estate Futureproof Festival in Amsterdam, People’s Choice Most Innovative ConTech Product at Buildex Alberta, one of the Most Innovative Companies at the World Geospatial Developers Conference 2022 in Beijing, and one of the Top 10 Most Anticipated Construction Technology in China. We are proud of this recognition as an industry leader in reality capture and even more thankful for those who have made it possible, including our OpenSpace team and the many users who have integrated our platform into their everyday workflows.
5. Announcing our Series D funding
In the past year, we’ve seen reality capture become increasingly mainstream and an industry-wide standard. At OpenSpace, we’re proud to play a role in this adoption and deliver a platform that is solving individual builders’ pain points on a global scale. We’re also encouraged by the value other industry experts see in our solution, including our strong community of advisors and investors. Earlier this year, we announced a $102M Series D funding round, led by former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at PSP Partners. To continue our growth, we also announced an additional $9M in August, for a total of $111M raised in the round. With this support, we are moving full-speed ahead on further scaling our platform and unlocking powerful new innovations to create an even larger impact on the construction and real estate communities.
Looking ahead to 2023
As we reflect on 2022, there are so many memorable milestones that we’ve enjoyed. From getting to meet new team members in person to attending (and hosting!) conferences to unveiling new product innovations, it was hard to pick only a handful, but it’s easy to say that without our customers, employees, and supporters, our successes this year wouldn’t have been possible. Thank you all for such a rewarding year; we truly could not have done it without you. 2022 was an amazing year and we have a strong feeling that 2023 will be even better!