#15 – Felix Reinshagen

#15 – Felix Reinshagen

January 14th, 2025

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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.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Welcome to LIDAR magazine and the LIDAR magazine podcast. My name is Stewart Walker and I am the managing editor of LIDAR magazine. My guest today is Dr. Felix Reinshagen. He is CEO and co-founder of NavVis. Felix, we’re delighted to have you on board, and it’s a great pleasure to be talking to you again. I can appreciate how busy you must be. So I want to start by thanking you for finding time to talk to us.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Thanks Stewart and thanks to your team for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here today indeed. The time before Christmas is always the most busiest of the year. But it’s a good time specifically after a year like that, and it’s as well a pleasure to pick up our conversation from where we left when we met at INTERGEO this year.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. Well, I’ll give just a little background, although I’m sure that most listeners are familiar with NavVis. You’re headquartered in Munich, Germany. You have offices in the United States, China and the United Kingdom. You serve global customers across the surveying AEC and manufacturing industries. I like the words from your website, that you “bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds through reality capture technology that provides the digital foundation for the world you want to live in. “We,” that’s NavVis, “supply fast reliable spatial data to service providers and enterprises seeking to capture photorealistic digital twins of the built environment.” That says it well.

Now many listeners I know will have seen NavVis folk walking around the exhibition floor at trade shows and conferences demonstrating the firm’s VLX wearable dynamic scanning systems. Now you mentioned the fact that we met at the INTERGEO event in Stuttgart, and that’s really the reason we’re having this conversation today. Publisher Allen Cheves and I were on your booth, on the NavVis booth on the occasion of the launch of your latest product, the handheld MLX. Quite often I start these podcasts by talking about the sort of biography of the guest. But instead of that let’s first of all cut to the chase. Felix, please tell us about the MLX which in fact received enthusiastic applause during the introduction in Stuttgart.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yeah, of course. We are very proud to have the newest edition of our LX 3D scanners released this year. And you already perfectly summarized what we are doing. And the VLX align of shoulder carried scanners has now been sold I think to almost 70 different countries and is the foundation of many of our customers reality capture efforts. But of course that’s a wonderful thing to say it with just (sounds like: business) words. That the customers are always asking for more and have additional ideas of what they would additionally like to do. And when it came to reality capture technology we heard mainly that customers love the speed and specifically the combination of speed and quality.

But there were two additional things they were really looking for, and one was a device that would be even smaller, even more nimble. It would be perfect for doing even smaller projects. It would be capable of getting into tiny spaces, behind pipes and rooms that are stuff with building equipment. And that meant for us to shrink so to say the scanning quality of the VLX line into an even smaller form factor that you would wield with one hand.

But it would still be perfectly suitable for (sounds like: long ask end runs), which is usually very difficult for a scanner that’s only handheld. So VML-X comes with a harness, but still you can kind of wield it easily with one hand and get everywhere, even into the tiniest spaces.

And the second thing we heard was that customers wanted a device that has an even lower entry price point. So that it would be suitable for smaller projects, for smaller companies or for companies that would want to have a device on even more distinct spaces permanently installed. And that were the two most important asks that we think we found the almost perfect solution for in the NavVis MLX. That is not as cost efficient on very large projects. So if you are looking for the lowest possible per square foot, per square meter price of reality capture on vast amounts of square feet or square meters, it’s still the VLX line you should be targeting.

But if you are doing mainly smaller projects, if you have many small rooms and in general if you are looking for a lower entry price point, then I think now with the MLX that’s a perfect product on the market for you.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you, and I think you’ve answered some of my other questions. But one that I did have was, obviously the VLX line is continuing. The new product is an additional product in the product line. And one question I had from that was, do all the products work both indoors and outdoors?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yes they do. So the technology in general is independent of this being an indoor or an outdoor environment. The device is mainly – first powered by a lidar SLAM. So there is one condition for that. So you need to have some distinct features, some geometry so to say that the lidar SLAM can cling to. Which means if you are on a very, very large outdoor space with literally nothing to see for let’s say 20, 30 meters in each direction, there is really absolutely nothing, that is where the lidar SLAM technology comes to its limits. Or as well in an indoor environment it’s absolutely featureless. So theoretically this would be a tunnel that goes infinitely into kind of both directions. It’s always 100% smooth and clean. So no features like pipes or doors or other things where a SLAM algorithm can cling to.

That are the only limitations. With that in mind, there are very few environments like that. And buildings (inaudible), outdoor environments, like forestry or topo surveys, many of our customers do them very successfully and of course much faster than you could be doing with traditional scanning technologies.

Dr. Stewart Walker: I’ve certainly found during my 50 years in the industry that we geospatial folk tend to get excited by hardware. But in the NavVis case you couldn’t have success without top tier software, and that’s called IVION, if I’ve pronounced it correctly. I like the way you describe hardware as “reality capture” and software as “reality access.” That’s pithy. It’s also accurate. I know that one of the strengths is your proprietary high performance SLAM component. You’ve mentioned that just now. So I’m wondering if you could tell us more about that, and also tell us whether your systems include GNSS receivers or IMUs.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: So perhaps a few words first on hardware and software. Of course the whole space of professional measurement and then reality capture, doing this at vast scale so to say, has traditionally relied on the most precise measurement instruments. And that was mainly precision hardware engineering. But I believe and we at NavVis believe that we are at a tipping point in our industry, where it’s much, much more important now to have vast amounts of data from different sensors and then combine them on the software side with smart algorithms, more with machine learning. And that is superior so to say to an approach that would be going with kind of a hardware focused, fewer measurements, each individual measurement taken with the highest precision.

That of course directly comes to the next part of your question, that means you need to have different sensors that you can combine. In our case with the VLX and MLX, it’s a combination of lidar sensors. But lidar sensors that have many lines. So we use sensors that have 32 lines of scanning that each consists of one fast rotating lidar measurement point. So we are actually on the MLX talking more than one million points of measurement per second. On the VLX we have two lidar heads. So it’s twice as much.

On top of that we have RGB cameras, actually four on the MLX. And that of course is data that we additionally take into account. The MLX as well has two video cameras that we don’t have on the VLX where we have two lidar SLAM heads. Those devices have an IMU, which we as well using additional data source, additional independent data source. And then we are not using GNSS on the devices. But we allow the devices to tie into any additional measurement points, on the ground or on the wall.

So all of our customers are professionals. They have GNSS receivers rovers, and the devices can very, very easily tie into any points taken by any already existing GNSS receiver. So why have we decided to do that? The reason is very simple. The GNSS solutions that’s usually built into a device are not as accurate as the rovers that you purchase separately. And on the quality that we have now achieved in SLAM, that is usually then diminishing the quality. On top of that of course we won’t make the devices more bulkier, heavier and not adding any value for our customers that usually already own various GNSS receivers.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, now I understand better and indeed, there’s been a bit of a debate in maybe the UAV photogrammetry world about whether you need ground control or not. And I was delighted in Stuttgart where you took time to show to us the sort of retractable probe on the MLX that you can use to touch a control point or reference point.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Indeed. So professional measurement indeed is always about error control. And usually you do that by building in redundancy. So without that option, to allow professionals to double check the quality of our device against any other system of measurement is very difficult to get to that level of reliability and I think quality guarantee that you can actually achieve with a NavVis system by now.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Now I think in Stuttgart you said that the price of an MLX, I think you said 39,000 Euro or 39,500. Now what does that include? What’s in the package?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: So it’s $39,000 US dollars or a little bit less than 35,000 Euros. And the package is always consisting of the hardware, the system software. Actually three year package of renewals of the system software is included. And we usually do very regular, at least once a month usually more frequent updates of the system software that improves the (sounds like: UX) that further improves the quality of the scans.

And then as well it includes a one year license each of our processing cloud, that allows you to take all the raw data and make the final point cloud panoramic images to the floor plan that we are generating out of that and of our IV on reality access platform. That of course allows you to walk and review the data as well do the quality control, like more for the professionals. But as well for the users to do measurements, to do collaboration, kind of to post comments at points of interest. So it’s a very complete package by now that is covering both workflow aspects of the people doing the reality capture and publishing the data. As well as the people that want very, very easy convenient and almost lifelike access to the data from any device, with very, very little pre-training.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you. And now for a word from our sponsor, LAStools.

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Dr. Stewart Walker: So Felix, your website indicates the verticals on which you concentrate, surveying AEC manufacturing. Can that be characterized in some way? What’s the most common task for which your users deploy their VLX and MLX systems? And also do you have any automotive customers?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yeah, so the space has vastly expanded. There are so many use (inaudible) of verticals (inaudible) first think about service providers and owner/operators. The service providers are usually surveying companies, reality capture companies, but as well other construction companies. So there are people that work on other people’s buildings so to say. And that’s of course people that are very, very used to doing measurements as part of their job. Either because they are only doing measurements as a surveying company or reality capture company would be doing, or because it is so essential to what they are doing in the case of a construction company.

And here reality capture and then of course, like, SLAM-based technology and our software portfolio comes in as an evolutionary step that makes it significantly easier and offers a lower price point to do measurements in usually the kind of projects that a surveying or reality capture or construction company would be doing. A lot of that’s of course on construction sites. It’s to create BIM models. It is a way to document construction sites thoroughly, as well use the data to detect errors or mistakes in the construction process.

So it’s usually very construction focused. Even though of course some of these service providers as well work for owners/operators. That’s a second aspect. On owners/operators we started with the automotive industry. So owner/operator, very simple as people that own and operate their businesses in buildings. Usually very large buildings. And we started in the automotive industry, that’s more for historic reasons now because the first iterations of our technology were carts.

So before we could make the technology so flexible and small that it should be shoulder carried or even wielded in one hand, it was mounted on a cart. And in the automotive industry we are dealing with factories that are vast, can be tens of millions of square feet, just one site. But they are mainly 2D. So everything is happening pretty much on one storey. And that was very well accessible for our technology in the beginning.

So by now we are actually serving owner/operators in very kind of broad spectrum of different areas that is still automotive, which is a huge focus. But as well in oil and gas, in process industry in general, in ship manufacturing, in logistics. So pretty much companies that own and operate in very large spaces with a lot of expensive equipment placed in these environments. And a lot of these buildings and the operators have in common that there is a lot of change ongoing. And that reality capture is a great way of keeping track of what you really physically have in place there. Because you might have initial documentation or 3D models of that space. But as these sites are changing, it is extremely difficult to keep track of all these changes in your 3D models.

And then if you want to plan for any changes or you want to have any discussions about changes or repairs or even improvements on the shop floor, it is dangerous to rely on documentation or models that might be outdated and not reflect the reality in these spaces correctly. That’s exactly where now NavVis comes in and our capability of doing reality capture much faster and at much larger scale. So there we are talking about a lot of planning use cases. So every change to say that you want to properly plan, you can base on fast and highly detailed scans and then the easy access through our software of that space.

But as well it’s more shop floor operations, repair and maintenance where you might have external people coming visiting your site that can educate themselves about the details and avoid potentially very costly repeat visits if they find things are different from what they expected and might need to come again. Or if you have many sites on a global scale and people want to compare notes or look at how certain details have been sorted for in different factories across the world. So benchmarking or continuous improvement programs more now want to rely on digital documentation. It needs to be easy to access and easy to share. So that’s just a few of the use cases that we are catering towards today.

Dr. Stewart Walker: It’s amazing to listen to you there and think about the range of applications and think also that ten years ago technology like yours just kind of wasn’t around in the same way. So they have the capability now to do so much. But I’m wondering whether one of your goals is to replace tripod-based systems for terrestrial laser scanning. Are you competitive with those on accuracy, range, point density, et cetera? The reason I’m asking that question is that those systems clearly are less mobile than yours and are a little bit more cumbersome. But the manufacturers have done things like using cameras to keep track of where the system is when it’s picked up and moved. The system doesn’t have to be exactly leveled every time the tripod is set up. So there’s maybe a little bit less differentiation. But do you see your systems replacing those?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Eventually more, but that would take quite some time. And right now they are much more symbiotic. So let me perhaps start with a more longer term perspective. Until very recently it was so to say commonly assumed that if you want to do really great measurement you need to do that from a stable point. But I think that is actually thinking and technology of the past. Very clearly measuring is moving to a new level so to say where the advantage of seeing things from many different observation points is much more important and adds much more to the quality of the measurement. Not even talking about the speed of measurement, than just measuring from one stable point.

And that was to some extent a surprise for us as well as we’ve been going through the development from the earlier systems to where we are today. And that’s already showing to say in some of the aspects of data quality. If you want the highest possible resolution on small details, or if you want to measure over very long distances, today a terrestrial tripod-based scanner is indeed superior in this part of data quality. Which is mainly because these devices have been optimized for very small beam divergence.

While we are using mass produced lidar sensors that were originally developed for robotics or automotive self-driving cars applications and have much more beam divergence over larger distances, the beams get pretty sizeable. And it’s then difficult to resolve small objects. But it’s not a result of SLAM in itself, which some people might think. That with SLAM you will always be less capable of scanning things that are further away or having good resolution on smaller objects. Actually the opposite is true, and where SLAM devices are already superior today is of course in completeness of data. Because you don’t move the scanner and every one of the infinite points you are moving through on your movement trajectory, is an observation point.

So you are actually observing your environment from an infinite amount of points, which you would never be able to do with a static scanner so to say where you might be getting faster in moving from point to point. But you will never be as fast as a scanner that can just continuously scan. You will never have as many observation points. And many observation points of course reduce the number of inclusions, of blind spots, which is a big advantage I’d argue in itself. But as well it allows you to go much more rigorously after spray points and points that are otherwise artifacts from neuros or reflective surfaces.

Because if you are not observing so to say these spray points from a different angle of measurement, you can automatically delete these points because they are not really there. They are artifacts of the process of scanning. That’s already showing. If you look at the dataset that is recorded with a VLX or MLX in a room full of pipes, you will be very surprised how clean and how complete a scan like that comes out. So having said that, right now they are very complementary attributes still to a terrestrial scanner. Larger distances if you want to scan for (sounds like: high facades) or if you want very small details, a terrestrial scanner is still going to be superior.

But as we are getting better infusing camera data into the lidar point cloud, as we get access to lidar sensors that have smaller beam divergence, I’m absolutely convinced that the advantages that terrestrial scanners have today will over time become significantly smaller. While of course the advantages of being totally mobile I think will be much more universally enjoyed in the future. But that’s for sure still a couple of years out.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Interesting. I think you’ve certainly cast light on that differentiation. I appreciate that. Now that we’ve learned a bit more about your products and your ideas, your thinking, let’s talk a little bit about you and get to you know you a little better. You’re born in Germany. You obtained your diploma in engineering, (sounds like: dabbling) in computer science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which is very well known in the geospatial world for top class education, leading edge research. And then you followed that with a PhD from University of St. Gallen, which is a beautiful city in Switzerland. Which I know well from my days in the past working for Leica Geosystems and its predecessors. So what was the subject or your doctoral work, and do you want to tell us anything about your early years?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: I have always followed so to say two passions. I studied computer science and economics. So I wanted to get insights in both worlds. When I was still in high school I made a little bit of extra money writing code and then working as a software architect. So that was something I already had quite a bit of experience before I even started going to college. But as well I already knew that I didn’t want to focus entirely on software development. So that’s why I added the economics degree.

And then for my PhD I tried to combine both things. My thesis was around getting into more holistic systems, IT systems for very, very large companies to improve their managerial practices. Which was both exploring—that was in 2009—how you could actually combine very, very different IT systems that would cover very different aspects of your business with kind of the latest progress in managerial practices. It was a good combination so to say of my education on both computer science and the economic side. And as well to some extent—you did mention that—after I got my master’s degree I joined McKinsey, the consulting company in a practice that at that time was called Business Technology Office. So it was well targeted towards combining perspective from classic managerial theory and perspective and the coming of IT as a kind of core business practice in every company.

So I had served two years at McKinsey. I had my degrees in economics and computer science. And then I thought a PhD thesis that would combine these experiences would be the right thing to do. Indeed thank god it was a great place, and we had a lot of external research partners that contributed to the research work. So that was a good time.

Dr. Stewart Walker: No, I’m sure our listeners will be familiar with the name McKinsey and of course of the big successful consultancy companies. It’s probably sort of primus inter pares. It’s certainly very well known. Its alumni include CEOs of, for example, Alphabet, Morgan Stanley, Vodafone, Lego, Levi Strauss. So altogether you were there for nine years. I’m sure you can’t say very much about the projects that you worked on. But was there a particular area maybe that you found exciting?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: So first, I had a very good experience, and I think a lot of so to say career groundwork, good practices I had the chance to lay there for myself. And that was because I had the chance to work across a variety of different sectors. First I started here in Europe. Then I did my PhD. Then I moved over to New York and then worked in Silicon Valley as well. And started working with banks, insurance companies and then I worked for a lot of tech companies as well.

That was definitely a very broad so to say additional education looking in very different sectors, working on a broad variety of projects. And as well with brilliant people. Like, McKinsey is well known for being an important career station for COs and executives in a variety of different industries as well, particularly in the tech industries these days.

Dr. Stewart Walker: That’s extremely impressive. And I think that career path certainly underlines your tremendous ability obviously. Also your language skills. Also your drive. And I think the question maybe our listeners have is, how did all this lead to a geospatial career, founding an industry leading company and getting to where you are today? How did you make that change?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yeah, that is of course hard so to say to see just, like, looking at kind of the college university background, the PhD and the work at McKinsey. I have to add that my dad was a civil engineer (inaudible) out of the company that was focusing on renovating very old historic buildings. And he was as well always struggling because these buildings didn’t have kind of a single straight 90 degree angled corner. They had to get very creative around measuring these spaces out and get a good build documentation in place.

But it would be lying to say that when I started my career I would have expected to ever come back and help solve that problem. But I was very aware that that problem existed. After a few years at McKinsey I was actually thinking that I really wanted to not always be a consultant but build something myself. And after I had spent some time in Silicon Valley I already became aware that there is something like the start-up ecosystem. People trying out new ideas, building companies from (inaudible), and I was very intrigued. I already looked during my time in Palo Alto at a couple of different businesses that I was interested in joining.

But there was nothing really that caught my interest to that level that I wanted to give up my career at McKinsey at that point in time. And for me it was always clear I wanted to do something that was coming from a strong technology angle. All the ideas I looked at were more ideas for app or e-commerce business, and I was not really interested in that. And then I had the chance at McKinsey to – as a junior part, to look into a couple of new fields of development for McKinsey. And one of the areas that were really emerging is some of the most promising new fields of technology was computer vision. That was in the early 2010s. Perhaps some of the listeners remember that was the time when AlexNet was actually beating everyone in inventory cognition tasks.

So computer vision was somehow suddenly on everyone’s agenda. And I looked at some potential use cases in analyzing the footprint of video cameras and brought in one of my best friends who was a postdoc researcher here at Technical University after having spent some time at Stanford University. We discussed a couple of use case applications, and then we as well had a closer look at how we could use some of the research that he and his team had done for a couple of years.

Step by step so to say developed the business plan to take that technology and spin it off from the Technical University here in Munich and to a separate company. Of course that then always takes another big leap of faith to really do that, for me to quit my job at McKinsey and for him and his team. We brought two of his PhD students over as co-founders to as well leave the university. (Inaudible) a great offer from one of the large Silicon Valley companies at the time to join.

Yeah, we all decided that is kind of a groundbreaking new technology that would have very interesting applications and that would be worthwhile for all of us to start from scratch and try build a company out of that. Here we sit 11 years later. I haven’t regretted it. Even though of course like every company we had to go through our fights and struggles as well.

Dr. Stewart Walker: And you’ve touched on some of the people I was going to mention. The launch in Stuttgart was well orchestrated, and the speakers in addition to yourself were NavVis CTO Dr. George Schroth and Chief Revenue Officer Finn Boysen. Would you like to say a few words about them? And I’m interested also whether the co-founders are still principal leaders in the company.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: All four of us are still in there. We are all still very engaged and (inaudible) the positions each one of us. Of course the company has been growing quite a bit. We started with the four of us. That was (sounds like: Garrick) and myself and then Sebastian and Robert. Sebastian now leads our largest engineering team, and Robert is one of our most senior engineers on the team. So everyone so to say found as well their individual role and place in the company. And we wouldn’t be where we are today without each of us being part of that founding team and adding our contributions.

At some point in time you as well need to grow the team. And not only with brilliant engineers as we did in the beginning. You need to bring experienced managers on board. Finn is one of them. He comes from Microsoft, but we as well brought in very senior people from Google, from Amazon. So you see we are very focused in bringing in people from the tech industry because we felt that they actually over the last one and a half decades were best at accumulating the best managerial talent.

But as well of course we have hired quite a number of people, like from our industry just very recently (inaudible), for example, who is heading sales on service provider side coming from Timble to us. So Finn has been our first Chief Revenue Officer and has pretty much built out the whole go to market side. Way we are approaching our different industries of course require very specific set ups on the sales side. But of course we brought in experienced people on marketing, on (sounds like: post) sales, on sign ins. I think it’s adamant at some point in the growth of the company that you strengthen yourself with external managerial talent as well.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. Now my next question starts with a guess, and I’m guessing you’ve got somewhere around 350 employees now. Is that right? And how are they spread across the globe?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. I think it’s a few more but not that many. We are still kind of slightly below the 400 people mark. The majority of the people still sits here in Munich we have all R&D, where we have as well the parts of (sounds like: outer) production that we are doing ourselves, our industrial designers, a lot of the prototyping happens here. And then I’d say that’s perhaps around 250. And then of course we have our offices in UK and US, by now almost important single market. I think we’re getting close to being 50 people across our offices in New York and LA. But a good amount of the folks are as well working from their individual home offices to be close to our customers all across the United States.

And then we have an office in Shanghai. We have a very close partner we are working with in Japan, a market we are covering very closely. And we have channel partners in many of the largest and biggest economies in the world.

Dr. Stewart Walker: So do you both sell directly and use resellers?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yes, but for each market either/or. So in the markets we went to serve first, we built a director’s approach, which was adamant for us because we are what you would be calling in modern speak a “tech push company.” So we develop the technology. And from the technology’s capabilities we work towards the ready product and towards the needs of our customers. And because of that it was very, very important for us to have this direct customer connection and not have an additional channel partners between us and the customers in the beginning.

But then as we did grow we wanted to add additional markets, and we quickly figured that this is a very cost intensive thing to do and not even necessary. So additional market that we added and that we wanted to serve we decided to serve through channel partners or resellers. And we do that exclusively. So we don’t have a single market where we are both direct or through a channel partner. It’s always either/or.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, going back to the systems themselves, I’m inferring from what you’ve said that you contract out the manufacturing. Are you able to say whose lidar sensors and whose cameras you use?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: So of course that’s always systems if we are looking at the camera side. So we are using Sony sensors and custom made lenses by now. And of course the exact specification of the sensor and then of the lenses of course has been changing from device to device. And if it comes to the lidar modules are continuing to use Velodyne sensors. Now Velodyne has actually merged with Ouster which many of the listeners might actually know in the VLX-2 line, which are 16 line sensors. And we are using Hesai 32-line sensors on the VLX-3 and on the MLX.

Dr. Stewart Walker: That means that you are continually looking at what’s available on the market and what might dovetail better with your own requirements, which change from time to time.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: That is a very fast moving and fast changing environment. And we are constantly of course testing different sensors. It’s not about only the individual sensor. We are just seeing a lot of movement in the market when it comes to the smartest way of combining the input, so the data from different sensors. Fortunately in general lidar sensors haven’t progressed perhaps as fast as I would have originally thought. So if you – if I look back into some of the very earliest business plans that I have written more than ten years ago now, we anticipated much faster progress on lidar sensors, both in terms of technical capabilities. We talked about beam divergence, for example. Just as (inaudible) points per second, weight of the sensors and size and ultimately of course the price point at which these sensors would be available.

And even though billions and billions of venture capital have been flowing into that space, progress has been much slower than we anticipated. Of course there has been a lot of progress on the camera side because cameras are built into every smartphone, every – pretty much other electronic device these days. But I think the most profound progress perhaps has been on the algorithmic side. Specifically when it comes to working with RGB data. Now more infusing RGB data and lidar data.

These sensors are still very complementary, and we believe absolutely in combining them. But of course how heavy you invest on the lidar side or on the RGB sensor side. So a lot of flexibility in that. And that’s much, much more driven now I think by the progress on the sensor side compared to the much faster progress that we have seen on the algorithmic side, specifically of course with all the options that you have now with machine learning.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, well, we’re coming towards our close now, but I’ve just got some shorter questions. I saw from your website that you have some other kinds of partners, manufacturing, certified mapping partners, investors, solution partners. What are these?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Yeah, what we are seeing is what I would call the emergence of an ecosystem. What we have been working towards over the last years was two things. Of course we wanted to get to a level of quality with dynamic scanning or SLAM-based scanning. That is good enough for most of the use cases that people tended to use terrestrial scanning for. But at least ten times faster and at a fraction – so aiming definitely for a tenth of the cost.

And I think we are getting very close to that if we haven’t already achieved it from many use cases. And that has made something possible that was just not possible before, which is scanning at real industrial scale. Mass production so to say of square meters 3D scanned at amazing detail and easy to access. And what we are seeing now is that there is real ecosystem emerging of other companies of partners that start to make use of that.

So that brings us to some of these different types of partnerships like we are mentioning on our website and where we have got different partners for. One is many of our larger industrial companies are looking for our advice when they are looking for a local partner helping them conduct large scanning projects. And there we as well have 35 partners that we have actually done scanning projects together with in different regions. And we list them on our website. So if there is a large manufacturing company, for example, they can find recommended partners to help them scan their large industrial facilities in different parts of the world.

And then we have solution partners. That are usually companies that are more system integrated-like companies. But as well companies that build their own software products but use our technology to that end. And many of our larger industrial clients as well want to integrate our software with other software tools. Want to funnel data from our systems to other systems. And classically that would be happening with other software too. If you do implement a large SAP software tool in your company, very likely you will use system integration partners to help you tie your SAP system or whatever other large software system into your existing system landscape. And that’s more happening around NavVis as well.

So that’s what we are talking about if we are talking about this emerging ecosystem of people using our technology that we want to certify and as well help them market their service. And as well for our customers, to provide them with a range of additional options so to say in the different areas of need. Maybe conducting a scan or as well integrating our technology more broadly and with additional capabilities into their software landscape.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Just one question. I hope it’s not too sensitive. But I notice from your website that you have maybe half a dozen investors in NavVis. You’ve maybe raised around $100 million from them. But also as you’ve said your company’s been running for 11 years. It’s clearly successful. It’s presumably profitable. It must be profitable. So do you still need investor funding to meet some of your requirements?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: So we are at the lucky position now that we have grown the company to a point where we don’t need additional funding because we can just now live and grow out of our own cash flow. That doesn’t mean that this is the best strategy to do that because we believe this is an area that will be very, very strongly driven by technology innovation. So we are considering not if it makes sense to take additional capital, to further accelerate both our go to market as well as the tech development, the R&D side of things but just how much and what sequence best to do that. Because we believe that we have built a very distinct market position for ourselves.

But at first there would be many other customers out there that would very much benefit from using our technology, and for that you need a large go to market team. And I believe we should be moving even faster than we could be just out of our own cash flow. And we believe that we should be absolutely staying on top of the R&D game and the R&D game will be mainly determined by the machine learning capabilities and everyone who is following in this space as well, expensive endeavor. So we’ll definitely continue to fund raise in the future.

Dr. Stewart Walker: That’s interesting. You’re in a good position in the sense that you have the choice, but you have to make skillful management decisions in order to find the optimum way forward. Very interesting. Let me finish then just by asking you what are NavVis’ plans for the future? You’re growing. You’re healthy. Where do you think you’ll be in a year or three years or five years from now?

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: That’s a very good question and a very broad on. And of course I wish I had a crystal ball because it would be so helpful in making these nasty or pesky managerial decisions. But I think in a year it’s of course going to be much more incremental compared to where we are today. There’s a lot of additional customers in the industries we are in. We are as well getting broader. We are doing much more work in construction and directly with construction companies than we used to as the technology is easier and easier to use. And not for every project you need a specialized surveying or reality capture company, even though I believe that service providers have a very important role to play moving forward in the industry.

We are as well serving more additional, like, owner/operator verticals right next to automotive. If I look a few years into the future there are I think a couple of very fundamental forces at work. And one is that the cost of reality capture is going to be going down and down. And as that happens we will see an explosion of reality capture happening. Which is usually the ground rule or basic rule of mass production I was talking about earlier. As the unit cost come down you see an explosion in volume.

And as we see that explosion in volume, it’s going to become more and more interesting to do additional things with the data. As reality captures are very detail, life-like but still geometrically correct data of all these assets, all these buildings, all these machinery, machinery becomes available, we’ll see an explosion of capabilities of what to do with that data. Of course this kind of data is perfect for additional machine learning or artificial intelligence to analyze, break down, give recommendations. And that’s a physical environment we are living in, and I think we will make very good use of that data in making smart recommendations and increase the utilization, process quality of pretty much every process that tackles, so to say, the physical world around us. And that ties back to your initial citation from our website, that we want to help people, providing an entire digital layer on top of the physical reality that we are living in to make that – improve that world. To build towards a better physical reality by making that reality digitally accessible.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Dr. Felix Reinshagen, thank you very much indeed. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m very grateful that you’ve been able to participate in the LIDAR magazine podcast. We wish you well with your customer-based approach, your innovative products, and we hope to feature NavVis again in articles or podcasts.

Dr. Felix Reinshagen: Thank you so much Stewart. I as well very much enjoyed our conversation, and I am very much looking forward to seeing you soon on one of the trade shows or should you ever be in Munich, just let me know. It would be my pleasure to have you over here at our headquarters.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you. 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 that listeners will join us for forthcoming podcasts. We’re expecting more guests whom we believe you will want to hear. If you want to ask about our podcasts or make comments, don’t hesitate to write to podcasts@lidarmag.com. That’s podcasts@lidarmag.com. Thank you for listening. Good day.

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