Architecture and civil engineering software company Datumate has announced a $5 million financing round led by Battery Ventures. Existing investor Al-Bawader, an Israel-based investment firm which invests in the Israeli-Arab business community, also participated in the round.
Datumate, a market leader of ‘field-to-plan’ technologies, says the new funding will be used to continue product innovation, fuel the company’s rapid growth into more markets and acquire more customers worldwide.
“We’re proud to have Battery join our team of impactful investors,” said Haim Zelikovsky, Datumate CEO. “Battery’s worldwide reach and track record in helping its portfolio companies grow will be a great asset for us and allow us to keep innovating and delighting the market. We have a very big opportunity in front of us, and we want to continue to move quickly and smartly to capture it.”
Datumate’s software won the Most Innovative Product Award at GeoForm+2013.
Datumate transforms the civil engineering and architectural spaces by using image-processing technology to dramatically reduce the amount of time crews spend in the field taking technical measurements for projects while maintaining a high level of accuracy, as well as time spent in the office transforming these measurements into maps and plans. This revolutionizes the laborious and error-prone process of capturing field data and turning it into a GIS map or a CAD plan, which currently involves taking detailed field measurements with dedicated surveying equipment; making sketches by hand in the field; and then turning them into a technical plan.
Dr. Jad Jarroush, a 20-year civil engineering industry veteran and CTO at Datumate, says the technology Datumate provides could “radically changes the entire face of the civil engineering industry.”
With Datumate’s software platform, surveyors, architects and civil engineers simply photograph the surveyed area or object with a regular camera and then draw their maps or plans directly on the resulting digital images. This streamlines the process of turning field data into maps and plans, making it faster, cheaper and of a higher quality than the traditional method used today.
“Driven by the rapid evolution of digital photography and cloud computing in recent years, Datumate is at the forefront of a real paradigm shift in the civil-engineering and architecture markets,” said Itzik Parnafes, a general partner at Battery Ventures who is joining Datumate’s board. “Datumate is shaking up the industry by fundamentally changing the way field data is captured, communicated and used. Datumate’s team is smart, experienced and aggressive, with a pioneering solution and unique IP, and we are very pleased to partner with them to help them scale.”
“We are very impressed with team behind Datumate, the product they have built in such a short time, the traction it gets with users and the vision behind the company,” said Jimmy Levy, Managing Partner of Al Bawader. “They’re offering a truly unique solution to help a community of hundreds of thousands of civil engineering and architecture professionals attain a step-function improvement in their productivity.”