Blackshark.ai’s Digital Earth Twin Attracts $ 20M in Funding – TechCrunch
Summary
Blackshark.ai, the Austrian startup behind the digital globe you fly over in Microsoft’s flight simulator, has raised a round A of $ 20 million to develop and scale its replica earth technology. The world took a look at a fully traversable and remarkably (if not 100%) accurate globe in Flight Simulator last year; we called it a “technical miracle” and later went into detail about how and by whom it was created. The machine learning system they developed can extrapolate from imperfect outlines by taking into account the neighborhood (residential vs. commercial), roof type (sloping vs. flat), and other factors such as the presence of air conditioning, etc. “For us, for example for floods, a use case of climate change, we provide the 3D data for Seattle, for example, and others who specialize in water physics and fluid simulation can use the real world as a basis. In this case, however, it’s less hot air and more the idea that interesting AR / VR / etc applications, from games to travel guides, want to base their virtual experience on a recently rendered version of the earth they can.