OpenSpace

JEEVAN KALANITHI: Hey, my name is Jeevan. I am the CEO of OpenSpace. And what OpenSpace does is pretty simple. We're a computer vision company, but we exist to make the lives of really everybody that works in physical reality easier, with a specific focus on construction and real estate.

So the core product is something simple. We allow people in the construction industry to warp into their projects from anywhere at any time. It's kind of like a Google Street View for their projects, but they can see what's there without literally having to be there.

So the real kind of aha moment for OpenSpace was when it was just me, Mike, and Philip. We were working with a bunch of people we knew from the construction industry from our past lives. And what we had built was something that looks similar to the product today, where you kind of look around and see everything without being there.

So there was an afternoon I was on a job site in Berkeley. I went out to the second floor, climbed the ladder, and was kind of taking a bunch of these 360 photos right before they [? had ?] to pour concrete. I do that, go back into the job site trailer, and we process the data. And I'm kind of looking around at it.

And then a guy named Nick Mirkovich, who was a project manager of that project, kind of stopped by. He looked at what we had put together, and he was like, oh my gosh, this would be so useful. Because we were showing all the rebar and post-tension cable before they poured the concrete. And he was just saying, you know, I've been burned so many times by-- we pour the concrete, there's no Undo button in construction. So if something is wrong under there, it is bad. It's a lot of money and a lot of pain. And now with your thing, it looks like I can see under the concrete without having to rip it open.

And he kind of gave us the idea. He was like, you know what would be cool, though, guys? If you could give me that camera and I could just wear it, like I just stick it to my hard hat. If I could kind of wear it while I'm doing other stuff and it's just taking photos or whatever you guys need to do in the background, and then it kind of automatically puts it all together after the fact, we would definitely buy that. I was like, OK. Eureka. That's what we need to do.

The core product of OpenSpace basically takes a simple video file from a 360 camera and figures out where the camera is at every moment in time. What does that mean for the user? It means that a construction person can walk around a site the way they normally do at the end of the day. The camera, it's just kind of riding along. And then as a byproduct of that, they get this complete view of their project that they can access, really, whenever they want to.

So as OpenSpace continues to grow, we are looking for a few things. One, real estate developers, construction companies, trades-- they could get a lot of value out of our system, so we'd love to get a chance to explain what we do and see if people want to try it out. There are a lot of players in this ecosystem that could really benefit from what we do. These include insurers, lenders, and inspectors.

So we have insurance partners today that recommend OpenSpace to their clients, because it allows them to more efficiently adjudicate claims. It's kind of like if you get in a car accident, you can send a photo of the accident and not have the insurance adjuster have to show up. Saves everybody a lot of time. We're like the supercharged version of that for real estate development.

You can talk about precision underwriting, where the amount of data that we are collecting gives a much better picture of the risks on the job site. So that's insurance. With lending, it's similar. The way this works, this industry works, is people get paid for the work they get done. It's pretty hard to verify that. With OpenSpace, it's easy. You can just do it from your desk. So that allows things to really speed up. So we have some partnerships with some lenders that are into the real estate development industry. So we'd love to continue building on those early wins and see if there's more we can do there.

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