A San Francisco company that turns a drone flight into a centimeter-accurate 3D model of a mine - fast enough to act on before the dust settles.
A drone hangs over a quarry at first light. It is not taking a picture - it is taking a measurement, and somewhere below, a bulldozer is waiting to be told exactly where the dirt is.
There is a certain kind of company that spends a decade doing something unglamorous, gets very good at it, and then one day gets bought by an industrial giant that most people associate with yellow bulldozers. Skycatch is that company. On July 7, 2026, Caterpillar - the world's largest maker of construction and mining equipment - announced it had acquired Skycatch, a roughly 40-person San Francisco startup that photographs holes in the ground for a living.
That description is unfair, so let me be more precise. Skycatch does not merely photograph holes in the ground. It flies drones over mines, construction sites, and energy facilities, captures thousands of overlapping images, and runs them through photogrammetry - the science of reconstructing three-dimensional geometry from two-dimensional pictures. The output is a 3D model accurate to within a few centimeters, which is the difference between "roughly that much dirt moved" and "1,842 cubic meters of dirt moved, here, since Tuesday." In heavy industry, that difference is worth money.
The company was founded in 2013 by Christian Sanz, a U.S. Navy veteran with a long software career - he had been CTO of Storify and had started DroneGames, a hackathon series for people who liked to make flying robots do strange things - and co-founder Christopher Bumgardner. The founding idea was ambitious in the way that only mid-2010s San Francisco ideas were ambitious: index the physical world the way search engines had indexed the web. Google had made the internet searchable. Skycatch wanted to make the ground searchable.
This is a nice pitch, and pitches are cheap. What made Skycatch durable is that it picked a customer that actually needed the thing. Mining and construction companies move enormous quantities of material and have to know, constantly and precisely, how much. Traditionally you did this with survey crews walking the site - slow, expensive, occasionally dangerous. A drone that can do the same job in fifteen minutes is not a novelty to a mine operator. It is a line item that gets cheaper and a safety incident that does not happen.
This next step strengthens our ability to support customers while increasing delivered value.Christian Sanz — Founder & CEO, Skycatch (on the Caterpillar acquisition)
Most drone startups of the 2010s sold drones, or they sold a cloud app, and they competed on price until it stopped being interesting. Skycatch made two bets that were harder to copy.
The first bet was the edge. The places that most need mapping - remote mines, half-built highways - are precisely the places with the worst internet. Uploading gigabytes of drone imagery to a distant server is a fantasy in the middle of a copper mine in the Atacama. So Skycatch put the computer on the site. The Edge1, built with DJI, packs an NVIDIA Jetson supercomputer and a GNSS base station into a rugged box. It processes drone images into precise 3D models locally, no connectivity required, and can run deep-learning models on top to identify features in the data.
The second bet was hardware nobody else could get. In 2018, DJI - the largest drone maker on Earth - agreed to custom-build a drone for Skycatch. The Explore1 was the first drone DJI ever custom-manufactured for an outside partner. That is not a press-release detail; it is a moat. When the dominant supplier changes its assembly line for you, competitors cannot simply buy the same thing off a shelf.
Put together, the pitch to a mine operator became refreshingly concrete: land a drone in the desert, fly the site, and thirty minutes later hold a survey-grade model in your hands - with no signal bars required. Speed and independence from connectivity turned out to be the features customers paid for, more than raw accuracy alone.
There is a deeper reason this mattered. Autonomous mining and construction machines - the self-driving haul trucks and robotic dozers that Komatsu and Caterpillar have been building - cannot move safely without an accurate, current map of the ground. Skycatch quietly became that map layer: the unglamorous foundation underneath the flashy robots. If you want a machine to dig to plan, you first have to tell it, in three dimensions, what "the plan" looks like against reality.
An on-site edge computer and GNSS base station built with DJI, powered by an NVIDIA Jetson TX2. Sub-5cm accuracy, built-in WiFi/LTE, and deep-learning inference - all with no cloud connection.
A high-precision RTK drone custom-built by DJI on the Matrice platform - DJI's first for an outside partner. Fly, process, and receive centimeter-level 3D outputs on-site in about 30 minutes.
The Explore1 and Edge1 together: automated RTK/PPK drone management, fast edge processing, and 4D terrain visibility for mining operations regardless of location.
A processing engine that converts drone imagery into high-accuracy 3D data - roughly 60% faster than off-the-shelf tools, with results in 10-15 minutes.
A device that connects to industrial machines, letting customers plug in additional sensors to expand ground-level data collection beyond what drones capture from above.
Proprietary software for the DJI Matrice 300 delivering end-to-end edge power and up to 24x faster data processing for mine sites.
Skycatch raised more than $73 million over its life - notable less for the total than for who was on the cap table. Google, Komatsu, and Autodesk rarely share an investment. Here it made sense: a search giant, an equipment maker, and a design-software company all wanted the ground to be data.
Custom-manufactured the Explore1 - its first drone built for an outside partner - and co-built the Edge1 base station.
Investor and distribution partner; agreed to deliver 1,000 high-precision drones for Komatsu Smart Construction and distribute the solution worldwide.
Jetson TX2 powers on-site AI in the Edge1; GPUs drive 3D visualization and deep-learning analysis of collected site data.
Strategic investor bringing Skycatch geospatial data into construction design and BIM workflows.
Acquired Skycatch in July 2026, folding its spatial data into RPMGlobal and MineStar mining solutions.
Caterpillar-owned mining software business that Skycatch's near-real-time spatial view now feeds into.
Christian Sanz and Christopher Bumgardner start Skycatch to capture and analyze 3D drone data of the physical world.
Raises $13.2M with Google Ventures, Bee Partners, and Avalon Ventures.
A $27.4M round led by Komatsu deepens the push into construction and mining.
Ships the DJI-built Explore1 drone and Edge1 base station - on-site processing with no connectivity required.
Launches 3D/4D software for the DJI Matrice 300 with up to 24x faster edge processing.
Raises a round led by ADB Ventures and Wavemaker to scale the data platform.
Skycatch is integrated into RPMGlobal and MineStar to bring near-real-time spatial data to mining fleets.
Measure material movement. Fly a mine or quarry and know, to the cubic meter, how much material moved between two dates - the core loop of production tracking and reconciliation.
Catch construction errors early. Overlay a drone-built 3D model against the blueprint to spot deviations before they become expensive rework. Compress project timelines by finding problems while they are still small.
Feed autonomous machines. Give robotic earth-movers the current, high-precision terrain map they need to dig, grade, and haul to plan - the pairing behind Komatsu Smart Construction.
Monitor sites over time. Because the data is 4D, you can watch a site change across weeks - stockpiles, slopes, haul roads - and adjust plans as conditions shift underfoot.
Work anywhere. With edge processing, none of this needs the cloud. A team in a signal dead zone can fly, process, and get answers on the tailgate of a truck.
Skycatch captures drone imagery of industrial sites and turns it into centimeter-accurate 3D and 4D models using photogrammetry, edge computing, and AI - primarily for mining, construction, and energy operators.
It was founded in 2013 in San Francisco by Christian Sanz (CEO) and Christopher Bumgardner. Sanz is a U.S. Navy veteran who previously created DroneGames and was CTO of Storify.
Yes. Caterpillar announced the acquisition on July 7, 2026, to expand its mining technology portfolio and integrate Skycatch's spatial data into its RPMGlobal and MineStar solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed.
More than $73M across several rounds - a $13.2M first round (2014), a $27.4M Series B led by Komatsu (2017), and a $25M Series C led by ADB Ventures and Wavemaker (2021).
Its cloud photogrammetry engine, the Edge1 on-site edge computer and GNSS base station, the DJI-built Explore1 RTK drone, the High Precision Package, and 3D/4D mining software for the DJI Matrice 300.