Disperse raises $15 million for computer vision that tracks construction site progress
Summary
Founded in 2015, Disperse is one of a number of startups setting out to disrupt the trillion-dollar construction industry, a sector not renowned for its efficiency due in part to a general lack of digitization. At its core, Disperse is all about helping companies track progress across construction projects to identify inefficiencies, through capturing imagery and using computer vision to spot issues as soon as they occur — before they escalate into bigger (and more expensive) problems. The Disperse platform creates what the company calls a “digital twin” of a site, through combining construction schedules, 3D models, drawings, and weekly snapshots captured on-site. Users can also backtrack to see the state of a site at a particular moment in time, which may help in terms of solving disputes over issues that arise and at what stage of the job they happened. The camera is just an off-the-shelf device, and doesn’t entail any special proprietary hardware or anything like that — the secret sauce really, is what comes after the data is captured, which includes processing it and applying computer vision to understand what’s happening on-site.