photogrammetry
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Steve Zeets Measures the Ground From the Sky
A rodman learned to fly, an FAA webpage blinked, and an Iowa surveyor built a career around one stubborn question: can drone data be trusted on the ground?
Whirrx Learned the Hard Part of Drone Surveying Isn’t Flying - It’s Earning the Engineer’s Trust
The Cedar Rapids company stopped selling the magic of flight and started selling what happens after landing: checked data, usable files and accuracy a surveyor can defend.
The Startup That Turns Drone Photos of Cell Towers Into Money
Anne Zink built a company that lets you inspect a 300-foot cell tower without climbing it. The trick isn't the drone - it's what happens to the pictures after they land.
Rebulk
Rebulk is a Y Combinator (S25) startup that measures and monitors bulk inventory - feed, sand, grain, logs, biomass and other materials that never fit into boxes or barcodes. Using fixed cameras, drones, LiDAR and computer vision, Rebulk stitches 2D imagery into 3D volumetric models to give industrial teams precise, repeatable volume and weight data instead of rough estimates and manual checks. Founded in Olathe, Kansas by Warren Wang and Cole Robertson, the company pivoted from video transcription (as dScribe AI) to bulk inventory tracking and now runs pilots with partners including Cargill and Charm Industrial.
SiteSee
SiteSee is a Brisbane-founded software company that builds AI-powered digital twins of telecommunications infrastructure. By combining drone capture, photogrammetry and machine-learning audit engines, it turns survey-grade imagery of cell towers and rooftops into interactive 3D models that tower companies and mobile network operators can inspect, measure and upgrade from a desk - cutting site visits, speeding colocation approvals and helping owners get more value from their assets.
Trendspek
Trendspek is a Sydney-based software company that turns drone and reality-capture imagery into exact 3D digital models of buildings and infrastructure. Its Structural Lifecycle Management System (SLMS), built on the Precision Asset Intelligence (PAI) platform, lets asset owners, engineers and contractors inspect, measure, report on, remediate and monitor structures from a single living record - replacing scattered PDFs and site visits with traceable, measurable digital evidence used across 45+ countries.
Scanifly
Scanifly is a New Jersey-based B2B software company that helps solar contractors design and survey photovoltaic systems using drone imagery, photogrammetry, and AI. Its cloud platform turns a five-minute drone flight or remote satellite/LiDAR data into a to-scale 3D model accurate to within 1-3 inches, then generates layouts, shading reports, and permit-ready plan sets. Contractors use it from pre-sale proposals through post-sale final design to cut survey and design time by as much as 90% and reduce costly change orders on install day.
Jason Steinberg
Jason Steinberg is the CEO of Scanifly, a drone-based software platform that lets solar companies survey rooftops, build 3D models, run shading analysis, and produce permit-ready designs without repeated site visits or dangerous roof climbs. A CFA charterholder who once installed solar panels on New Jersey rooftops, he spent years financing renewable energy projects at Bloomberg New Energy Finance and CohnReznick Capital before taking the helm at Scanifly in 2018. He hosts the podcast 'When Life Gives You Lumens,' where he digs into how the solar industry can scale through better technology, safety, and workforce development.
Skycatch
Skycatch is a San Francisco drone-data company that turns aerial imagery into centimeter-accurate 3D and 4D models of mines, construction sites, and energy facilities. Founded in 2013 by Christian Sanz and Christopher Bumgardner, it pairs custom DJI-built drones and on-site edge computers with a cloud photogrammetry engine and AI to give industrial operators near-real-time maps of the physical world. Backed by Google Ventures, Komatsu, Autodesk, and others, Skycatch was acquired by Caterpillar in July 2026 to strengthen its data-driven mining technology portfolio.
PRENAV
PRENAV digitizes the world's critical infrastructure with drones, LiDAR, 3D analytics, and deep learning. Its web-based platform, PRENAV.XYZ, combines photogrammetry with AI to turn drone imagery into detailed 3D digital twins, then scans them for cracks, corrosion, and structural damage - resolving surface features smaller than 0.2mm. Founded in 2013 in Redwood City, the company replaces dangerous rope-and-scaffold inspections of cell towers, wind turbines, bridges, dams, and even nuclear reactors with automated, precise, GPS-independent drone flights.
Ali Khaloo
Ali Khaloo is a structural engineer turned AI founder who builds software that reads the health of bridges, dams, runways and cooling towers the way a doctor reads an X-ray. As CEO and founder of Aren, the New York company he spun out of Cornell Tech's Runway Startup program, he fuses computer vision, machine learning and civil engineering into an AI-powered digital twin platform that turns drone images, laser scans and sensor data into 3D condition maps and predictive maintenance plans. He holds a PhD in structural engineering, has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers cited over 1,000 times, and owns several patents for AI analysis of large infrastructure systems.
Polycam
Polycam is a cross-platform 3D scanning and spatial AI company that turns iPhones, Android phones, and drones into professional reality-capture tools. Used by architects, game studios, forensics teams, and millions of hobbyists, it combines LiDAR, photogrammetry, and Gaussian splatting to make 3D capture as easy as taking a photo.
Elliott Spelman
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.