#12 – Clint Graumann

#12 – Clint Graumann

August 27th, 2024

Announcer: Welcome to the LIDAR Magazine Podcast, bringing measurement, positioning and imaging technologies to light. This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of rapidlasso, producer of the LAStools software suite.

Stewart Walker: Welcome to LIDAR magazine and the LIDAR magazine podcasts. My name is Stewart Walker, and I’m the managing editor of LIDAR magazine. Today our guest is Clint Graumann who is CEO and co-founder of NUVIEW Inc. Clint, we’re delighted to have you on board. I appreciate that you must be incredibly busy. So I want to start by thanking you for finding time to talk to us.

Clint Graumann: The pleasure is mine. I’m glad to have the opportunity to participate and so many of the people I admire in the industry either write or participate with LIDAR magazine in some way, shape or form. So it’s great to be here.

Stewart Walker: Well, let’s start with just a little bit of background. Many of our listeners will have heard of NUVIEW. But just in case, let me read a sentence from your website which is NUVIEW.space. Our mission is to revolutionize the earth observation industry by building the premier commercial satellite constellation dedicated to annually mapping the planet’s entire land surface using lidar technology.

Our cutting edge data will elevate worldwide capabilities, transforming human understanding of the earth and expanding the horizons of what is possible. That means satellite lidar. I myself was enormously privileged to have been invited to the launch of Isar 2, which most of us bring to mind when someone says satellite lidar. There’s also of course the global ecosystem dynamics investigation, or GEDI instrument on the international space station. But NUVIEW’s ambitions transcend even these systems. I just find that incredible. So we’re all ears. Have I got that right? Is that what you’re planning to do?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, absolutely you have that right. And GEDI and Isat, we really consider as the forefathers of what is possible to annually map the planet. As you know with those datasets they’re incredible instruments put together by some of the most brilliant minds in the industry from around the world. And we’re so thankful that those are there because one, it’s proven that it’s a capability that it’s possible. It’s proven that it’s a dataset that is required, and it also has set the foundation for building something even more ambitious, as you mentioned on top of that. And NUVIEW’s goal is to be the most viable, foundational geospatial intelligence in the world. And when I say foundation, it’s really important to understand that piece because yes, we’re going to have capabilities for imaging something from a monitoring standpoint or to be able to do penetration of canopy when we stare at something and watch it for an extended period of time during an orbit.

But it’s really about creating this foundational dataset that companies that use optical will use our data as well as foundational pieces to that data, (inaudible) to that data to get together. We’ll see it with SAR. We’ll see it from all different types of datasets. So you’ve got it right. It’s a huge mission, and we truly believe that it’s something that’s going to take the entire community around the world to realize all of the success that’s possible.

Stewart Walker: Before we get into the weeds of your company and its plans, we want to know a little bit more about you. We know that you received your education at the University of Oklahoma. But please tell us a little about your life before that.

Clint Graumann: So there’s one population in the world that will care about this. But it was from Oklahoma State in Oklahoma. Oklahoma is a big rivalry between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. But yeah, I received my background and education there. So I grew up in Southwestern Oklahoma, which if you’ve ever seen a western on television it looks about like that. In Celsius it regularly gets up to about 43 degrees in the summer, in July and August.

We’ve had even much higher temperatures than that. But it’s incredibly dry. It’s incredibly hot. It’s the setting for the movie Twister. So everything in Oklahoma is more challenging, especially in the part of the state where I come from. Grew up in the shadow of Altus Air Force base where my first experience with space came when I was extremely young, of the space shuttle Discovery landed there when it was trying to avert weather, just on the way from the West Coast to the East Coast. And that really got me interested in the space industry, and I was always an avid reader of National Geographic. My oldest brother had a whole closet full of National Geographics.

And what that really set the stage for was when I found the opportunity to work in the space industry for a company that collects satellite imagery, it was the perfect marriage of space and geography together that really allowed someone that had this vision of what they wanted to do as a five-year-old come to life as an adult to be able to participate in both of those worlds.

Stewart Walker: Yeah, I’m sure many of us wish that we were on paths that were so clearly defined early on. Sometimes it’s more difficult to decide what we want to do. But anyway, what career did you pursue after college, and how did that cause you to found NUVIEW in 2022? I looked up and your two previous posts were with (sounds like: Agreon) and Teremetrics. I sort of see two themes emerging, agriculture on the one hand and elevation on the other.

Clint Graumann: Yeah, so right out of university I worked for several financial institutions. The first ten years of my career were in the financial sector. Finally settling up with JP Morgan where I worked for a while. And with that I kind of got into the space industry by moving to Germany, and the only business in town that had English as a first language was a company called RapidEye. Being able to work in the financial sector and really get a good understanding of commercialization for quite a number of years and then going to a company that was very science oriented, but needed commercialization aspects. It was great to be part of something at the foundational level. Because there were a couple of other companies that had built their own satellite technology based on optical capabilities and some on radar capabilities.

But to be able to do the first of something, which we were the first company to build out a small site constellation to be able to image any place on earth on any day. Not everywhere every day. But the small site constellation concept, that was the first company to do that. And so after working in that sector and then ending up in the geospatial sector, it was – earlier you said that it’s great to be in a career that’s got such a direct path. But it’s more like point A and point B were known, but it was an incredible zipper effect in between to get there all along the way.

Stewart Walker: Well, let’s move on to the part that people most want to hear, technology. When Isat 2 was being developed and launched, many of us, certainly including myself, marveled at the handful of photons that made it to the ground and back. And then they were picked up by that remarkable super sensitive detector array that was developed by Sigma Space, which is now part of Hexagon. And we’ve written about that in the magazine. Beyond that we think of Isat 2 and GEDI as being big government funded projects involving big satellites, high power consumption. But you’re going down a slightly different road. So I wonder if, for those of us who don’t have PhDs in physics or double E, could you explain what your technology is and how is it different from these existing satellite lidar solutions?

Clint Graumann: Sure. So our satellite technology really is about being able to work on a minimal number of photons possible. And when you think about a sensor of this type in space there are several things that really matter, and one is the power of your laser. One is the size of your aperture, and one is the altitude that you fly in and then the ability to handle a thermal dissipation. Because you really don’t have that same type of issue when you’re dealing with aerial lidar. You can cool it pretty easily.

And so in space you’ve got to work with those four main factors there to be able to get enough returns back. And then the camera that was used on GEDI and Isat were sensitive, but the sensitivity becomes more and more important the further away that you get. And with the type of imaging and collections that we’re going to do, very sensitive cameras are extremely important.

And so there were a number of things that really came to light when we decided to start NUVIEW. One, this has been an extremely costly challenge on the government side. And as you know, any time you have a project run by the government you’re going to get great results. But they’re’ often going to be compromised at government pricing. A compromise on requirements by user community across a very broad group. You also have extremely long cycles to develop something.

And so once you’ve locked down the requirements they instantly become stagnant, and you’re dealing with technology that ages over time by the time you actually get to launch. And so I couldn’t quote the exact figures, so I hope no one will hold me to this one. But when I was first kind of looking into the history of GEDI before we decided to build NUVIEW, GEDI when it was first conceived was based on the latest technology. But by the time it was built the technology that was the principal foundation was many years old. And that’s just the nature of a government program.

But I also want to make sure that people understand that’s not a disparaging remark against a government program. It’s such a remarkable thing that they’ve done to be able to seed the future on what we’re building. And so as a venture backed company we’re able to iterate much faster and try things and sometimes they work great. Sometimes they fail. But you don’t often have that luxury on a government budget or a government program. And so we’re incredibly thankful to all of those who have built Isat and built GEDI to give us that fundamental understanding of what’s needed at the different levels. But I would say big aperture, powerful lasers, low flying and great thermal work, those are all absolutely the key to it.

But I think the single biggest key is the fact that being venture backed we can iterate and move faster and try technologies without having to commit to one for an extremely long period of time.

Stewart Walker: And you’re going to do this on relatively small satellites?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, relatively small. We haven’t released to the public what our specifications are on that. But think of it about the size of a dishwasher in a typical American sized home. This spacecraft is something that even five years ago would have been a challenge to be able to get the type of power production out of it, to be able to get the laser production out of it. To be able to get the pointing accuracy and stability. Like, all of those things even five years ago would have been extremely difficult to come by.

And we had almost two dozen companies that responded to our RFP to work on our satellite bus, for example. And we’ll be announcing who we selected. They’re already working, but we will announce that later on who that was. But finding the company that could produce that type of stability in a spacecraft was absolutely key for us.

Stewart Walker: I’m not an expert in this at all, but the dishwasher sized satellite, that’s similar to RapidEye isn’t it?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, that’s – it’s not a coincidence. The RapidEye system, today many people have forgotten about it. But the RapidEye system was such an amazing set of spacecraft that were incredibly high quality data, incredibly reliable. And it sits somewhere between what is legacy space, where you have these big school bus sized, billion dollar satellites and the sizes that are a loaf of bread, it’s considered new space. And we fit somewhere in the realm of microspace. Meaning we still have the agility and size to be a company that moves extremely quickly. But you get a lot of benefits of both worlds by being in kind of that sweet spot on the size of your spacecraft.

Stewart Walker: Okay, now I’m not sure whether you’ve published or whether you can talk, are there any details available of how many satellites there will be and what kind of orbits?

Clint Graumann: Sure, yeah. So the goal is to build 20 of those satellites. We’ll actually have 21. The first one is named Mr. Spock. It’s our space proof of concept, and that one is intended to – it was actually intended to be an R&D mission. But we had a ton of success with getting out and building the word on that one. We’ve already got contracts on about half of the data from Mr. Spock already.

And the next 20 will be put in orbit and different planes to give us the ability to image the entire planet in a year. But it also gives us an incredible ability for revisit time intra day in kind of the mid latitudes. So we’ll be able to revisit any single spot on the land mass from about 50 degrees north to 50 degrees south 4 times per day. Now that doesn’t mean everywhere four times per day. But the capacity will give us an ability to revisit multiple times.

And so one of the capabilities of that specific set of requirements gives us that revisit, and it also gives us the ability to increase the number of points that we collect over a given area throughout the day. And then we can stratify that data to get different changes throughout the day. And then over time we can build up these high point density areas with different temporal layers that you can use for three dimensional change detection. So those are our orbits. Those are our number of satellites and some of the capabilities that come with it.

Stewart Walker: And so Mr. Spock is already flying? It’s operational? And so you know that your lidar technology and detector and everything work.

Clint Graumann: I’m glad you asked that question. Today we are building Mr. Spock. That’s our current satellite, and we’ve not publicly released what altitude we’re putting it in. But we’re going to put it in at a higher altitude and then start to bring it down systematically over the life of that satellite. And we’ll be doing that for the entire time that we’re building the next group of satellites. And that will help us inform many different things, such as blazing power, also kind of where we’re hitting the diffraction limit on the optics and also how many returns we’re getting back based on that laser power and those different attitudes. And then effects on drag and stability and all those things.

So we’re going to do that all the way down intentionally. And so the date will get better and better as we come down. But yeah, that’s the purpose of Mr. Spock first. Like I mentioned, it was an R&D intention. But that R&D will inform where the next 20 end up in their optical and nominal positions.

Stewart Walker: Well, I’m sure that I and the other listeners are looking forward to your press release that says that Mr. Spock is operational. I now want to have a word from our sponsor LAStools.

Announcer: The LIDAR Magazine Podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso. Our LAStools software suite offers the fastest and most memory efficient solution for batch-scripted multi-core lidar processing. Watch as we turn billions of lidar points into useful products at blazing speeds with impossibly low memory requirements. For seamless processing of the largest datasets, we also offer our BLAST extension. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

Stewart Walker: Clint, what do you think will be your main markets?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, I think we’ll see a pretty traditional adoptance curve in the beginning. And we don’t expect government and defense to be our largest market. But we do expect it to be our largest first group of customers because there’s such a pent-up demand for this type of elevation data with precision and accuracy because it just hasn’t really existed at any real scale yet. But there’s a lot of opportunity for us in the agriculture sector. There’s a lot of opportunity for us in anything related to climate science, especially in understanding the carbon markets.

There’s also a lot of opportunity for us in the energy and mining sectors. And so to really paint us as one sector is pretty difficult to do. And as an example of that, when we went out to build our commercial case for investment backers, we ended up signing some pretty significant contracts and letters of intent. And we did it with purpose to diversify across industries and across geographies. So we’ve developed these agreements in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia. And all of these were purposeful to show that there’s a diversity and high demand, not a specific one siloed opportunity for our capabilities.

Stewart Walker: It’s interesting, you mentioned government and defense there as being maybe among your first customers, but in the longer term not the largest. And I do see that one of the members of your leadership team is Jack Hild, who I met a couple of times when I worked for a defense contract, and he was with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. But I also note that your chief scientist is Dr. Paul McManamon, and he’s an incredibly eminent scientist in LIDAR. For many years he was chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory. I think it’s pretty incredible that you’ve got these two gentlemen on your team.

Clint Graumann: Oh yeah. You couldn’t find a person more thankful to achieve the ability to get people of their caliber on our team. And there’s so many more that are maybe not as well know, but are equally as talented. And when I think about working with Jack, he and I had worked together for about 12 years. After he left the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency he was working alongside me where we were travelling the world and preaching the gospel of commercial satellite imagery to different government entities to start to build that market beyond government capabilities.

And so we got to know each other really well through that. And Jack’s been an incredible asset to the company, and I hope that we’re returning some similar benefit back to him. And then in addition, Dr. Paul McManamon, you’re right, he was the former chief of the Air Force Research Lab and the sensors directorate. Incredible experience in optics, lasers, synthetic aperture radar, optical imagery. Like, all of these things are very – and lidar being his specialty. And one of the things that anyone that’s known Paul very long has heard him say is that, when he was the chief of the sensors directorate, he was supposed to love all of his children equally. But he really loved lidar the best. And I think that was just such an incredible thing to hear from a talent like him and kind of the story behind how we got together was that I had been just working so hard for about six months. Trying to find the right person to be our chief scientist at NUVIEW.

And we would get great conversations going and meet great people, and then it would – just for some reason or another just never felt quite right. And my chief of staff at the time said, “Clint, you know that book that you’ve been reading on lidar? Why don’t you call the guy that wrote that book?” And I was, like, that’s a brilliant idea, to call the guy that wrote the book on lidar. So I called Dr. McManamon and told him what we were trying to build. And he said that he thought it was fantastic. And so we hired him on. This was before we had raised any money, and hired him on, on a bootstrap and paid him. I said, let’s develop the first phases, and let’s make sure that the feasibility is really there.

And so Dr. McManamon built our – or just created our first design on our lidar, and we’ve been iterating since then. But it was just so incredible to see his mind at work and all of the people in the industry that respect and love him. And we’re so thankful to have Dr. McManamon on the team.

Stewart Walker: Excellent, excellent. That’s sort of heartwarming news. You’ve got these excellent relationships as well as the very highest level of talent. It bodes well. So going back just a little bit, your start up emerged from stealth mode in 2023, and you announced an in progress $12 million series A funding round led by MaC Venture Capital. The award-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio who’s an angel investor in companies that focus on sustainability and the environment is one of the investors in that round. How is your funding going now?

Clint Graumann: I was looking the other day at some statistics, and I think we went a year or two where we didn’t see any initial public offerings out there in the market. And then recently I think we’ve got one or two that are showing up. So I’ve also dug in deeply on statistics on what money is being put into different rounds. And it’s been such a crazy dynamic market since the end of 2021. And we’ve done well in bringing in customer money. We’ve done well on bringing in contracts, and we’ve done well on bringing in investor money as well.

But I think it’s been challenging all throughout the market, and we’re thankful for the investment that we’ve received to date. We’ve received an investment more than what you indicated earlier. And we’re currently out there starting to build our next round. And so we’re really excited about where that’s going. But on top of the money that we’re working on right now we’ve also got great inroads into government acquisitions and things. So things are going full steam ahead.

Stewart Walker: Now your headquarters in Orlando, Florida. You have some operations in Berlin in Germany. I think I can now understand the letter because of what you said earlier about RapidEye. But what’s the background to Orlando?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, when we looked at where to plant our feed for NUVIEW we looked all over the country, all over the world. And first it only made sense to build it right here at home in the US. And then what was even crazier is how much sense it made to build it right here in Orlando. And when we came up with the idea for NUVIEW and started looking for what resources would be available to us wherever we go, one of the challenges that we had in Germany when I worked there was that we were so far away from the airport, it was hard to recruit talent. It was so hard to get customers to come to our location, because by the time you touched down and got to our location it was about a two hour combination of either car, train or by foot to get to our offices.

So we made the very conscious decision to be super close to the airport where everyone was going to be. And then in Orlando we’ve got something incredibly unique. We’ve got this great trifecta of talent in aerospace engineering, electrical engineering as well as specifically lidar engineering. All within a very short driving distance of NUVIEW. And all of that is such a highly condensed number of professionals in that industry, that there wasn’t anyplace else in the country that we saw that had the same resources as what we had here for that.

So we’re five, maybe ten minutes from the airport, depending upon the day. We have great talent specifically from optics and photonics with the University of Central Florida. We also have government contractors that are very close here with lidar capabilities in aerospace engineering. And we have incredible talent, fantastic companies like Luminar that are close by. Different type of lidar, but all of that combined, like the incredible resources just made all the sense in the world for us to just stay put.

And then we got an incredibly amazing investor that’s also here locally, is investing in our infrastructure and AI (sounds like: NT) facilities for integration and testing and laser labs and all of that. So we’ve just had incredible support here on top of incredible resource pool.

Stewart Walker: Now how many people do you have on the team? Is your workforce growing at the moment?

Clint Graumann: Like a lot of people our workforce is static right now. We anticipate after we get this next round moving forward that we’ll grow pretty substantially and almost all of that will be right here in the state of Florida. And then we’ve got a couple of open opportunities that would allow us to grow our other operations as well. And the one in Florida will be mainly dependent upon when investment dollars come in. And then the other opportunities around software, we’ve got an incredible software capability with enormous amounts of lidar built into it. And then in Europe, as we start to build out some of the other missions that we’re working on, that office will grow as well. So really each pocket will depend on growth on which part of the business was growing at the time.

Stewart Walker: Okay, again, this may be a question about information that you haven’t yet released. Can you say anything about the swath width, the resolution of the lidar and the accuracy of the data that it will generate?

Clint Graumann: Sure. One on swath width, I’ll probably not comment on that one because we’ve got some pretty unique IP around that. But what I will address is what the objectives and the requirements are that we’ve generated. So what we’re building toward, the KPIs are to match the standards put out by USGS on 3DEP data. We’ve seen that the USGS leads the world in large area coverage. And we think that enough time and energy and effort went into defining what those requirements are. It just wouldn’t make any sense for us to build something different because the market’s already used to it.

And so we’re building toward mapping the earth at a quality level two standard. I’ll let the group that’s listening to this podcast go look at all the specs because no one wants to hear a podcast to hear data specifications. But the quality level two standard and then we’ll build up toward eventually – which will be quite a strong feat to get to quality level zero dataset. And I’m not going to pretend that that’s going to happen quick and fast and tomorrow. That’s going to be something that will take years to get to on quality level zero. But it will be amazing. And you can think about it this way. Quality level two is designed for wide area coverage. Quality level zero is less about wide area coverage and more about areas of extremely high interest that consumers want to use the data for.

So it might be monitoring small areas. It might be foliage penetration, those types of things. So it will work from quality level two to quality level zero. There will be years in between. But we expect to position ourselves to be the leader in both.

Stewart Walker: Yes, I’m sure that most listeners are familiar with the USGS specs and will be delighted that you’re following those standards. There’s nothing new to learn on that. USGS has made this enormous investment and is continuing to make enormous investments in the 3DEP programs and its successor. Meanwhile a number of other countries, certainly in Western Europe but others too, are working on their national elevation programs. You’re not a competitor in any way to those. You may indeed be a supplier.

Clint Graumann: For sure. What we’re doing, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, is definitely a scenario where a rising tide lifts all boats. And we don’t want to go out and say, these programs shouldn’t exist. We want to be a partner locked arm in arm to go achieve these incredibly lofty ambitions that are either state level or federal level or provincial or at different levels around the world county. And we want to help supply data there. But there’s always going to be a place for the type of data that’s collected by aircraft that someone needs extremely high fidelity over a small area.

There will also be a time and place where someone needs wide area coverage and they need it fast. Or one of the things that are incredibly opportunistic for us is that when someone needs data over a given area, collecting continuously over time, we don’t have to have a pilot go out, jump in a plane, fly a pattern. Like, it’s a system that’s designed to be always on, but we can task it when and where we need to. And so we can’t do everything everywhere. But we’ll be able to do anything anywhere. But it’s all a trade off on capacity.

Stewart Walker: Sure, yes. What will be the products that you’ll offer? Will there be surface models, elevation models, classified point clouds, meshes, contours, all of the above?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, all of the above. Our focus is on providing extremely high quality data that we know better than anyone else in the world. And we provide that data out to those that need those capabilities. But it’s not to displace all of the partners and value (sounds like: editors) that exist within the market. And so if you think about the companies that are providing value added works today, like we want to work with them not against them.

When I first got into the optical imaging business from satellite based optical imaging, one of the things that we heard from value adders in the market was, great, if you’re going to produce mosaics. Like, what’s left for us, right? Because they put so much value on those mosaics. But what we found was that when we produced extremely high quality mosaics, all of those partners saw that they could make a great margin on being a reseller of that product and not have to invest the time and energy and resources. So everything on it was pure margin for them.

I anticipate that being the case with lidar as well, is that our capabilities will be there and available should those partners want to resell that capability. We’ll also be willing to work with partners who want to have unique lower case products that come out of that that are for their market. We don’t want to displace the partners in the network. We want to give them incredible capabilities around this data. Now the other thing that we’ve done, in February we acquired a company called Astraea that had built an incredibly capable software as a service solution around geospatial data with optical and radar. What we’ve done since acquiring them is re-tooled that to be very incredible around lidar as well. So that we can provide vast amounts of lidar to the market in the cloud or into architecture that has so far been extremely well accepted by the customers that we’ve put on that.

We’ve not announced publicly that we’re in it. It’s okay that it’s on this podcast. But we’ve not gone out to the market with a big splash. But we’ve got millions and millions of square kilometers of lidar data already built in from public datasets. And then now we’ve giving our customers the ability to take that data and exploit that along with optical and radar data at the same time. Which I think – you start to put all these things together, lidar is not a silver bullet. Radar is not a silver bullet. Optical is not a silver bullet. But when you put all these things together then you start to get a pretty magical combination.

Stewart Walker: Yes, I think that’s very well put. I think the days of people arguing that one technology completely supercedes what came before, I think we’re beyond that now. I think we all believe in complementarity of technologies.

Clint Graumann: You know, and professionals in the geospatial world never believed that argument anyway, that one dataset was universally superior to the others. Like, they all have incredible capabilities. And when you put those things together it’s a great recipe.

Stewart Walker: That’s right. Well, when I was having one of my conversations with USGS they mentioned your colleague (sounds like: Christian Dempster). And I believe that he and you are working on some sort of new global lidar standard. Can you say anymore about that?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, so you’ve got an incredible source of information to know that fact. But yeah, Christian is chairing that group for global lidar standard. As far as I will comment on is that Christian, he came from a government contractor that really was the first to commercialize this type of data. Also was very well positioned when he was in a secure environment, when it was not commercialized at the moment. And Christian is one of the most talented people that I’ve met in the business on being able to run those budgets, to be able to process data to an incredibly clean standard, like all of that. And so Christian is leading that effort to standardize that at a global level.

But the part that I’ve said I would comment is that we won’t necessarily pin down what those standards are going to be. But we are very in line with USGS standards, and we want to make sure, again, like I earlier mentioned, that we don’t have to teach the market something new. We can work on it and improve it. But I think asking the entire market to reconfigure how it operates and works with this data would be a mistake.

So we’re trying to stay in the flow as much as possible. If we were to reach back to one of the very first questions you asked me on this podcast, if we think about how we ended up arriving at NUVIEW is that I’ve been personally hearing this from our customers and my customers for 15 years on the need for more lidar. It’s not just the need for any lidar, but more lidar at scale. And you can’t get it with the type of sensors that are out there from space today. And so if we were to adopt those standards that exist today and then build the sensor around that, that’s kind of the magic. And even on the venture capital side you see that as well. The market told us what it wants. It wants USGS standards and wide area coverage at a global scale.

So why should we try to do something different than what customers and partners want? Let’s build the sensor that meets those needs. So that’s kind of the direction that Christian uses as his compass. But also it’s not just Christian. He’s the chair, but he’s working with so many other people that have incredible insight in this as well.

Stewart Walker: That’s good news. We’ve published a couple of pieces in the magazine by the European Trade Association, Eaasi, E-A-A-S-I about national elevation programs in Europe. And I would say just speaking very, very generally, the sort of specifications that they’re using are not out of line with USGS. They’re close, and the opportunity is certainly there for a global standard. No question in my mind.

Clint Graumann: Yeah, for sure. And those global standards though, I hope that people don’t look at them as something that we’re setting a standard by which all other groups are measured by. And that’s not really the point. The point is to create foundational geospatial data. And when I was with RapidEye, one of the – I think the unique things that I’ve been able to do in my career is build out the first large area agriculture monitoring program around the world. And it wasn’t that our data was better than World View data or wasn’t better than (sounds like: GOI) data. Those were incredibly capable and high resolution amazing systems.

But it gave everyone – like, major agriculture organizations, a dataset that was uniform and consistent everywhere on the planet. It was the foundation for all future things. And so you start to co-register all these different datasets together and pull them into one, and that was pretty great. And so the way you should think about global data standards in my opinion is that it’s a standard, foundational model, but not the absolute model. Because you can tease out so many different things by different standards. But we want to be the starting point for everything.

Stewart Walker: Okay, and I’m sure Christian and his group are in touch with the Open Geospatial Consortium, OGC and what you said on the podcast.

Clint Graumann: You should definitely get Christian on the podcast. If you really want to nerd out on the specifications he’s the guy. He’s got great vision for this stuff.

Stewart Walker: Okay, thank you very much for that. Well sir, coming towards the end of the podcast. I think it’s interesting, people like myself, we observe and we marvel at how geospatial science develops. And one of the exciting trends has been to see all the constellations that are – I was going to say springing up. They’re not so much springing up but being launched. Now we’re obviously familiar with big satellite constellations from Maxar and Airbus. But more recent years there’s been a plethora of small sat constellations. Everyone knows about Planet, which in fact I guess is the owner of RapidEye. And their (inaudible) collect imagery the entire planet on a daily basis in the visible and near infrared. And that’s only one example of what’s going on in that part of the spectrum. And then more recently we’ve had synthetic aperture radar constellations. We featured one in the magazine, Capella Space. Another is ICEYE. So I’m just wondering, do you foresee a world of lidar small set constellations? Or are you hoping to be the only one?

Clint Graumann: Well, I think for our financial stakeholders we would want to be the only one. But I actually think it’s better for the whole industry as once we’re successful, we start to see other companies bring in these capabilities. And if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a dozen times, I do believe a rising tide lifts all boats in this scenario. And the only challenge is that building a lidar system is much harder than building a radar system, and it is much harder than building an optical system. But the benefits are so much greater to be able to do that.

And it’s not just to commercialize that data, but commercialize it along with optical and radar. So we hope to see constellations. We hope to see numbers of satellites eventually go up. Because it only improves the science, and it only improves the data layer that comes with it.

Stewart Walker: Yep, I agree with that too. And I think we’re coming to the end of the podcast on a very, very optimistic note. So let me just mention that NUVIEW has won several important awards, three this year so far. Most recently Geospatial Innovator of the Year at the Geospatial World Forum in Rotterdam. Earlier this year Charlotte Inno and the Charlotte Business Journal recognized companies or organizations who have been fantastic innovators in that part of the United States. You won one of their (inaudible) awards. And the American Advertising Awards NUVIEW won a Gold Addy and so on. So there’s a lot of really fantastic things happening. Industry influences are noticing you and applauding your ideas and your preparations. How are you feeling about the future?

Clint Graumann: Yeah, I think I’ve never been more humble in my life than the day that we heard from Geospatial World Forum that we won Innovator of the Year. And the reason that one was so special for us and the reason it keeps me so motivated about the future is that that’s a group of professionals like me that work in the geospatial industry that most people never know who they are anywhere in the world. Because they’re the guy that makes maps in the back of the office, right. No one knows who they are. But they’re so important to everything. And I’ve always loved being a part of that community.

And so when we won that award, I believe there were 12 people on an independent jury from around the world, and I’d never met any of them in my life. So it wasn’t like I was able to influence any decisions. But they were all well known people that heard about what NUVIEW was building. Realized the possibilities about what it can become and the potential of the data that it can produce. And for others that are professional in our industry to recognize something that started as an idea in the middle of the pandemic, literally in a hammock in the back yard, that has drawn inspiration from professionals everywhere. That was just extremely humbling to me.

But if we were to get past the part where it just made me feel so small in such a big group of people, to immensely proud of what the team has accomplished so far. To answer your question very directly, I’m extremely optimistic about the future because the world see is, government sees it, customers see it. And it lets me know that the idea is amazing, and so many people have put amazing capabilities on top of that idea to make it what it is today. So thank you for asking that question. It’s both humbling and extremely optimistic into the future.

Stewart Walker: I think that’s an excellent note on which to end. Thank you very much indeed. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m very grateful that you were able to participate in the LIDAR magazine podcast. We wish you well in your courageous venture. We hope that we’ll feature NUVIEW again in an article or in another podcast.

Clint Graumann: Thank you very much. I’m so happy to have been invited.

Stewart Walker: I’m sure listeners will similarly have enjoyed your company and comments today. I also want to underline our gratitude to our sponsor the popular LAStools lidar processing software. We hope you’ll join us for forthcoming podcasts. We’re expecting some guests that we believe you will want to hear. Good day.

###

Announcer: Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to visit lidarmag.com/podcast/ to arrange automated notification of new podcast episodes, subscribe to newsletters, our print publication and more. If you have a suggestion for a future episode, contact us. Thanks again for listening.

This edition of the LIDAR Magazine Podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso. Our flagship product, the LAStools software suite is a collection of highly efficient, multicore command line tools to classify, tile, convert, filter, raster, triangulate, contour, clip, and polygonize lidar data. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

THE END