“We are a data company,” Pittman told me when I met him for coffee last month. Another is adding immersive interior shots into mapping applications like Google’s Street View.
These, in turn, will be used in two ways: to feed Matterport’s machine learning to train it to create better and faster 3D images and to become part of a wider library, accessible to other businesses by way of a set of APIs.Īnd, from what I understand, the object will not just be to use images as they are: people would be able to manipulate the images to, for example, remove all the furniture in a room and re-stage it completely without needing to physically do that work ahead of listing a house for sale. It already has racked up 1.6 million 3D images and millions of 2D images, and at its current growth rate, the aim is to expand its library to 100 million in the coming years, positioning it as a Getty for 3D enclosed images. Matterport is further using this technology to grow its wider database of images. (Matterport Cloud 3.0 is currently in beta and will be launching fully on the 18th of March, initially supporting the Ricoh Theta V, the Theta Z1, the Insta360 ONE X and the Leica Geosystems BLK360 laser scanner.) Using an AI engine - which it has been building for some time - packaged into a service it calls Matterport Cloud 3.0, it converts 2D panoramic and 360-degree images into 3D images. So while Matterport still sells its own high-end cameras, it is also starting to work with less expensive devices with spherical lenses - such as the Ricoh Theta, which is nearly 10 times less expensive than Matterport’s Pro2 camera - and smartphones. On the hardware side, we’ve seen a rise in the functionality of smartphone cameras, as well as a proliferation of specialised 3D cameras at lower price points. Changing tides in the worlds of industry and hardware have somewhat shifted its course. Matterport’s roots are in high-end cameras built to capture multiple images to create 3D interior imagery for a variety of applications, from interior design and real estate to gaming. Matterport had raised just under $63 million prior to this and had been valued at around $207 million, according to PitchBook estimates.This current round is coming from existing backers, which include Lux Capital, DCM, Qualcomm Ventures and more. The company in December appointed a new CEO, RJ Pittman - who had been the chief product officer at eBay, and before that held executive roles at Apple and Google - to help fill out that bigger strategy. Sources tell us the money came at a pre-money valuation of around $325 million, although the company is not commenting on that.įrom what we understand, the funding is coming ahead of a larger growth round from existing and new investors, to tap into what they see as a big opportunity for building and providing (as a service) highly accurate 3D images of enclosed spaces. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Matterport - which started out making cameras but has since diversified into a wider platform to capture, create, search and utilise 3D imagery of interior and enclosed spaces in immersive real estate, design, insurance and other B2C and B2B applications - has raised $48 million. The growth of augmented and virtual reality applications and hardware is ushering in a new age of digital media and imaging technologies, and startups that are putting themselves at the center of that are attracting interest.
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