Fly a drone. Build an AI model. Inspect, measure and upgrade a tower without ever climbing it. That is the whole idea - and telcos on three continents are buying it.
Every cell tower carries a small lie. The paperwork in a filing cabinet says one antenna sits at a certain height, tilted at a certain angle, bolted to a certain frame. The steel itself, sixty metres up in the weather, often says something slightly different. For decades the only way to settle the argument was to send a person up the mast with a clipboard and a camera - slow, expensive, and occasionally dangerous.
SiteSee, a company founded in Brisbane in 2016, took a different route. It flies a drone around the tower, stitches the photographs into a survey-grade three-dimensional model through photogrammetry, and then runs machine-learning over that model to read the asset back to its owner. The result is what the company calls a digital twin: a trusted, measurable copy of a physical tower that an engineer can rotate, inspect and annotate from a desk.
The pitch is deliberately unglamorous. SiteSee is not promising to reinvent telecommunications. It is promising to remove the site visit - and with it the cost, the delay and the risk - from a long list of routine decisions. In an industry where a single truck roll to a remote tower can cost more than the inspection it delivers, that is a proposition tower companies understand quickly.
SiteSee raised under two million dollars and used it to digitise tower estates in Australia, the United Kingdom and the Philippines. The constraint forced focus: rather than a platform for everything, the team built a digital twin for one thing - telecom infrastructure - and made it accurate enough to trust.
SiteSee sells to tower companies - the TowerCos that own and lease the physical masts - and to the mobile network operators who hang their antennas on them. These are businesses that manage thousands of remote structures and make money by fitting as many tenants onto each one as safely and quickly as possible.
Three problems keep recurring, and SiteSee aims at all three. The first is inspection: rust, missing bolts and structural fatigue that traditionally required a physical climb to find. The second is measurement: the exact tilt, bearing and azimuth of each antenna, which drives the accuracy of an operator's radio-frequency network plan. The third is change: every time a new tenant wants to colocate equipment on a tower, someone has to confirm the structure can bear the load and that adding hardware will not breach electromagnetic-energy and RF compliance limits.
With a digital twin, each of those tasks moves indoors. An engineer opens the model, measures the antenna, checks the exclusion zone, and simulates the upgrade before anyone drives to the site. SiteSee reports that its early UAV reality-capture pilots on Australian towers showed major efficiency gains against manual inspection - the kind of quiet, repeatable saving that compounds across a large estate.
SiteSee's tools follow the workflow from capture to compliance - plan the flight, build the twin, audit it with AI, and hand customers a self-service window into their own assets.
The cloud digital-twin and AI SaaS core that hosts 3D reality models of towers and rooftops and layers analytics, inventory and revenue tooling on top.
A specialised drone mission-planning app that makes tower capture simple and repeatable, so field teams can be trained quickly and still produce high-quality deliverables.
Digitises telco tower assets in the cloud and applies AI Audit Engine services, turning drone data into inspection-ready information about the tower and its compound.
Adds Ground Control Points for accuracy beyond standard GPS drones - delivering antenna tilt, bearing and azimuth to a fraction of a degree to verify RF network plans.
Machine-learning services that detect defects such as missing bolts and rust, and derive measurements including exclusion zones and RF/EME compliance data.
Makes 3D tower twins editable - letting engineers correct, annotate and update the model rather than simply view it.
A secure portal giving customers direct access to their digital twins, audits and asset data whenever they need it.
Surfaces structural and load insight earlier in the process to accelerate tower upgrades and reduce late-stage surprises.
Plenty of firms will fly a drone around a tower and hand back a folder of photographs. SiteSee's distinction is what happens after the flight. Its output is not raw imagery but a decision-ready, editable digital twin, pre-loaded with the measurements an engineer actually needs - antenna tilt, structural detail, exclusion zones, compliance data - derived automatically by the AI Audit Engine.
That focus on telecom specifics is the moat. General reality-capture and asset-monitoring platforms treat a tower like any other object. SiteSee treats it like a tower: it knows what an antenna is, what a healthy bolt looks like, and what an RF hazard zone means. TowerSee MAX's ability to read tilt to a fraction of a degree from the air - a job that used to require a climber with a smart level - is the kind of precision that only matters, and only pays, in this vertical.
The alternatives SiteSee competes against are a spectrum. At one end sits the old world of rope-access climbs and ground survey crews - accurate but slow, costly and risky. In the middle are generic drone-inspection providers who capture well but stop at imagery. At the other end are broad digital-twin and asset-monitoring software vendors who model everything but specialise in nothing. SiteSee's wager is that the telecom tower is specific and valuable enough to deserve its own purpose-built twin.
SiteSee was founded in 2016 by a small technical team - co-founder Lucio Piccoli among them - and grew out of an early radio-frequency planning tool. Today it is led by chief executive David Pash, an infrastructure veteran with roughly three decades in engineering, construction and commercial leadership who moved from the investor side into the operating seat.
Pash's framing is consistently commercial. He talks about moving customers “from site truth to revenue” and about digital twins as a way for tower owners to monetise assets, not just visualise them - a discipline of turning technology into a number on a balance sheet.
SiteSee launches to digitise infrastructure for the telecom and power sectors.
The company joins Australia's startup accelerator ecosystem and raises early capital.
Drone reality-capture pilots on Australian telco towers show major efficiency gains over manual inspection.
Ground Control Points enable antenna tilt and azimuth accuracy to a fraction of a degree.
Fresh capital funds international expansion, taking total funding to roughly US$1.9M.
PhilTower digitises Globe-acquired towers using SiteSee's platform and QNSI field surveys.
Twins become editable, letting engineers correct and annotate models directly.
CEO David Pash frames the platform as moving customers from “site truth to revenue” in industry media.
SiteSee builds AI-powered digital twins of telecom infrastructure. It uses drone capture and photogrammetry to create accurate 3D models of cell towers and rooftops, then applies AI to inspect, measure and manage those assets remotely.
Tower companies (TowerCos) and mobile network operators, mainly in telecom and power, across Australia, the UK and the Philippines.
Instead of raw photos, SiteSee produces a decision-ready, editable 3D digital twin with AI-derived data - defect detection, antenna tilt, RF/EME compliance and structural insight.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, with a presence in Sydney. The team is about 17 people.
Roughly US$1.9M in total, including a Series A tranche of about US$580K in November 2022, backed by investors such as muru-D, River City Labs and Hapstone Partners.