#25 – Alex Baikovitz

In this episode, Mach9’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Baikovitz, talks enthusiastically about the company’s mission to improve geospatial workflows for generating information from point clouds, making heavy but considered use of AI, plus innovations from the world of robotics. His flagship product, Digital Surveyor, outputs the derived features to familiar CAD and GIS software suites and can be deployed from a web browser. Alex claims speed improvements of 5x compared to more traditional software approaches – and much more dramatic numbers in certain circumstances. The company emerged from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but is now located in downtown San Francisco, where the availability of a top-quality workforce and closeness to other well-known geospatial firms have proved beneficial.

Episode Transcript

#25 – Alex Baikovitz

December 8th, 2025

{Music}

Announcer (00:01.998)
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 (00:09.718)
Welcome to LIDAR magazine and the LIDAR magazine podcast series. name’s Stewart Walker and I’m the managing editor of LIDAR magazine. My guest today is Alexander Alex Baikovitz, co-founder and CEO of Mach9. Alex, we’re delighted to have you on board and it’s a great pleasure to be talking to you. It’s been a bit challenging to schedule this podcast and the magazine’s very grateful to you for finding the time.

Alex Baikovitz
Hello, it’s awesome to be here. Thanks for having us.

Stewart Walker
So let me set the scene very quickly. Mach9 is a supplier of software for generating information from point clouds, making heavy use of AI. So in the company’s words, Mach9 builds software that transforms reality capture data sets into high precision 3D maps, accelerating how teams model and understand the world.

Its flagship product, called Digital Surveyor, automatically extracts features like utility poles, signs, curbs, striping, and others from lidar and imagery datasets to create engineering ready CAD and GIS deliverables. Surveying, engineering, and GIS teams work with Mach9 to reduce the time and cost of 3D mapping and deliver projects faster than ever before. The company is based in downtown San Francisco. So, Alex, let’s start by learning a little bit about you please tell us something about yourself your early life and I also know that when you started college you were involved in a course regarding startups and entrepreneurship at MIT.

Alex Baikovitz
Thanks, Stewart. Yeah, I’m originally from Miami Beach, Florida, was always really interested in the intersection of business and technology and solving really interesting technology and technical challenges with meaningful solutions that could be turned into something that scales around the world. And so I was brought into the geospatial space back in college, but spent some time in high school at MIT and knew that I wanted to start a startup from a lot of really great mentors and people in my life that have helped me identify this really awesome path that I can take.

And after getting into the geospatial space just became enamored by a lot of the really awesome applications, use cases, and really people in the industry that I could work with to build something really great. And I think that that was just a really formative moment to starting a company and creating Mach9 in the first place.

It’s always interesting to learn how people get into the geospatial space because I’ve talked in these podcasts to so many interested and talented people and they all get in a slightly different way. Anyway, the college education that you referred to there was a BS in mechanical engineering, MS in robotics from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. At some point you had an internship at SpaceX. You went on to become a space technology research fellow at NASA Ames

Stewart Walker (03:33.184)
…in 2020, but that didn’t last a whole lot more than a year. And I infer from looking at the website and the internet, your heart was really still in the Carnegie Mellon environment. And shortly after you left NASA, you and three of your Carnegie Mellon colleagues, Haowen, Zach and Michael set up Mach9. That was in 2021. So the company has been running four years. So, I hope I’ve got that chronology correct. And somewhere in there was the point where you, you thought, geospatial is something that I want to a large proportion of my life involved with.

Alex Baikovitz
Totally, yeah. You’ve gotten a lot of that right. while I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, I was working with Red Whitaker, who was an early pioneer in field robotics and came from a civil engineering background. And others from the lab brought in expertise from other elements of surveying and engineering, and we’re applying them to really challenging, like remote sensing and robotics challenges and problems.

I’m inevitably we were working on a number of projects for the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management looking at legacy nuclear facilities from like the Manhattan Project days here in the United States and we’re building systems for decommissioning and decontamination projects themselves to investigate everything from tunnels to large process piping facilities and something we inevitably ended up learning right and identifying is we were just solving some hardcore challenges in surveying and mapping, not necessarily just building really cool robots and just got a lot of great introductions to the field of surveying and everything from how to use a total station or a laser scanner to best practices and measures to estimate quantities or uncertainty in different ways, shapes and forms. And so I think Red and his brother Chuck and others in that lab were really, really formative in bringing me into the geospatial space and a space that I found…

Alex Baikovitz (05:33.816)
…to be super interesting and exciting just because of this very awesome way for humans and robots and computers to see and understand the world. And that led to, you know, certainly getting some support from NASA as a fellowship. So it wasn’t an employment, but being able to support my graduate education at Carnegie Mellon and doing some really exciting research in underground mapping involving localization and mapping and really interesting tools like ground penetrating radar sensors to make sense of just this complex 3D data.

And I think seeing that time and time again was a huge inspiration to bring this group together and start building a really amazing team to tackle some of the toughest challenges in the geospatial industry, specifically those in terms of how to take all of these points and make them into usable maps, digital maps and usable information that can be helpful for industries like surveying and mapping as they are today as well as many other industries that will inevitably end up using this type of information and data to make critical decisions themselves.

Stewart Walker
Yeah there’s a whole lot that you said there that kind of links to other things that I’ve read or are going on and this parallel between robotics and or there is a parallel between what you said about robotics leading to surveying and mapping problems being solved and perhaps what happened 15 years earlier where there were those DARPA challenges and people put early Velodyne lidars onto vehicles and try to move them around the desert.

And therefore they also would be trying to solve surveying and mapping problems. I’ve just edited an article, it’ll be in the next issue. And it’s about a parish in Louisiana, which has mapped the interiors of all the schools in the parish so that the dispatchers for first responders and so on can…

Stewart Walker (07:32.62)
…dispatch police and fire and ambulance and so on to exactly the right place and save critical minutes and emergencies. just, it is exciting the stuff that we’re involved with.

Alex Baikovitz
Totally, and it’s going to continue to make a huge impact. And I think that’s a really key part of the surveying industry just overall is you can create a map and communicate something, but like the ease of communicating information really, really quickly is really a power of how to turn all of this data into a usable map that is understandable to many people and machines and others that can make these decisions like at Mach9 speed. So, some of where the name comes from. But really our core focus and mission right now is to help make maps faster than ever before.

Stewart Walker:
Absolutely. OK. So you’re located in downtown San Francisco. Presumably that makes it easier to hire high quality employees, although it does occur to me that lots of other companies are after them as well. So you’re just a bark ride across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley. You’re less than two miles from Ouster. You’re an hour’s drive from Palo Alto with all the great brains in Stanford. And then there’s that place called Sandhill Road where all the venture capitalists hang out.

Very importantly, you’re close to the Ghirardelli chocolate, close to source for that, which you have in your booth at Geo Week, which was very welcome for me. So how did you choose the location, and how is the geography working out for you?

Alex Baikovitz (09:06.254)
San Francisco has been a great place to build Mach9. And we actually started the company originally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when we spun out of Carnegie Mellon or brought the team, which consisted of primarily Carnegie Mellon graduates. We’re able to start really building the business, working through different types of concepts, building different products to figure out what really worked and what the industry and market really needed.

And it was really last year, or a little bit more than 12 months ago now that we moved the company to San Francisco as we were really growing and scaling and found that Digital Surveyor was growing around the world and needed a base where we can continue to develop a company with a strong in-person culture or keeping everyone together and really making sure that we have a lot of really great people working under the same roof.

Here in our office, which is down in Soma, we combine great engineers, great people in the data and operations space, great people in the commercial marketing, go-to-market side of the organization, and have them all work together to solve really exciting, interesting problems that are affecting the geospatial industry most broadly, and working together as one team to build a really great company and really great products at the same time.

San Francisco has definitely been a great place to be for that and for technology to be built and great technology companies to really make a huge impact and dent into the world and how it works and see a lot of opportunity here in the space of surveying and mapping technology, but also the broad space of geospatial to build a really another great company here in San Francisco as well.

Stewart Walker
Yes, I suppose moving upwards, so to speak, Planet is located in San Francisco as well.

Alex Baikovitz (10:48.834)
Definitely, yeah, Planet is another local company. The list of geospatial companies is pretty tight knit for the most part, but a lot of them do happen to be in this side of the world, which is pretty awesome.

Stewart Walker
Yes, indeed. Okay, well, you were talking about keeping people together from the photo on your website. It looks to me as if you have around 25 employees. Is that right? Are you growing?

Alex Baikovitz
That is correct. So on both sides of that. So we are about 25 employees today and the company is continuing to grow as we scale our go to market teams, our engineering and product teams, our operations team as well. So continued excitement around continuing to grow and build a really awesome team, solving these problems for customers around the world.

Stewart Walker
And now for a word from our sponsor, LAStools.

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
So Alex, let’s move on now to the technology. you and your co-founders, you were obviously inspired to take a big risk, form a company to create, sell and support very advanced software. What was behind this in the sense, did you see a glaring gap in the market? So, you know, did you have blue ocean thinking, you know, we can create something that will fill this space that at the moment is empty.

Alex Baikovitz (12:37.794)
Totally. So actually we started the company in the first place to think about these different ways to fuse all these different sensor data together. We were building actually our own mobile mapping hardware to integrate with ground penetrating radar sensors and solving all sorts of challenges around sensor fusion. But in the process of building that technology, we were able to identify this challenge around feature extraction and identification from point clouds in 3D data and naturally found that this is a challenge and problem that people not only had with the hardware that we were building at the time, but actually across all of the hardware and systems that they were using in their production projects.

And so, sought to really address that challenge first and foremost as well, and made some decisions to pivot the company out of the hardware space where we really focused on building a software-first solution and a software only solution to accelerating feature extraction and helping make maps faster than ever before.

And that was a really pivotal moment, but it really took working with a lot of great customers and users around the world to notice and understand the core pain and challenges that existed in how to turn point clouds into usable digital information and helping really achieve the fullest potential of these datasets. I think people have been collecting point clouds for decades now, but I think the biggest challenge has been, you know, I have all of this data. I have all of this lidar data or all of this photogrammetric data.

How do I turn this into a usable insight or usable piece of information that someone can use to make a critical decision? And I think that bottleneck has continued to worsen as the ability to collect this information continues to get easier and easier. And so our hope as a company is to continue to address that kind of opportunity of solving the gap of connecting data to actionable information and decisions downstream.

Stewart Walker (14:38.094)
Yes, so in those early days you had all these ideas and then you started going out into the market and I expect some things changed as a result of your experiences with customers and the feedback you received from them.

Alex Baikovitz
Absolutely. I think that one thing that’s like a core development philosophy like here at Mach9 is the perspective around just like constant relentless iteration on the product to make sure that we are building exactly what the market needs and like wants. And so that’s how we went from, you know, originally building mobile mapping systems of our own to then transitioning to focusing on a software solution for feature extraction on developing solutions for like points and line work and a lot of the critical features that customers are looking to extract from those data sets.

And then even today, just continuing to really own in on how to optimize the workflow so that, you know, in terms of any type of project, how do we make you faster, more productive, more efficient? So you have the greatest solution to solving the challenges around feature extraction from point cloud projects themselves.

And that’s just a process that our overall team is really focused on building a solution and a company that addresses this problem for everyone that has it as well. And really working with them, think, making sure that customers, partners, prospects, others, they’re all part of the same team here building the solution that will transform how the industry does work. And I think it’s not just our team that comes up with these great ideas. It’s really working with customers and collaborating with them closely to make sure that we are working on the most important things that solve their problems.

Stewart Walker (16:23.97)
Yes. I mean, I suppose you may have had to overcome a little bit of skepticism. Some of the customers to whom you’ve been talking probably have been collecting data from the days when they looked at images stereoscopically and manually measured points along lines. And then the software suppliers from that era started adding maybe handcrafted tools for line following. But now you’re kind of doing it all at once and you have to persuade the customers to trust you.

Alex Baikovitz
Totally. I think there’s a lot of skepticism around AI. And I think some companies in the industry have created a light of calling something AI and actually a friend on a call yesterday was actually saying like AI in some of the industry people can construe as actual individuals instead of artificial intelligence. And unfortunately that is a bad representation of AI solutions in the industry itself. And I think there’s a lot of really great powerful tools that have come out really in the last three to four years and making the timing for this a really exciting opportunity to be building an AI company for the geospatial industry is that now a lot of exist and capabilities exist that can help accelerate these types of workflows.

And I think a really big part of addressing some of the skepticism is figuring out how to embed these types of new automations and AI tools into production workflows for customers and not necessarily trying to rip and replace an existing workflow or process, but being able to help accelerate their workflows with automation specifically. And we found that type of collaboration is important to developing those relationships of trust that are needed to ensure that we can actually support these types of mission critical projects and programs that our customers are working on day in and day out.

Stewart Walker (18:22.304)
We’ve spoken fairly generally, maybe we’ll get down to a little bit more detail. Quite a lot of the listeners to this will know about your software, or they’ll have visited your booth at an event, but others don’t. So please tell us about Digital Surveyor. I think readers will be interested not only in the magic, if I can use that word, that you perform to extract features from point clouds, but also the practicalities of ingesting the data and exporting the results in other words the the interoperability of the product as well as the functionality.

Alex Baikovitz
Totally. So, Digital Surveyor is a software and a production tool to help you extract, validate, and deliver point cloud projects faster than ever before. And it’s really core to every single part of the field to finish workflow for a surveying and mapping project specifically.

Digital Surveyor is helping support and enable everything down to providing a workflow to go from your existing hardware systems from companies like Trimble, Riegl, like a NavVis, so on and so forth, to being able to create your templates and feature code libraries and others to make sure that you can deliver information exactly into the formats that you’re looking for, and then down to the production workflows and tools where you can use automated and automated assisted workflows to really speed up your point cloud feature extraction projects.

For detailed survey grade projects, we’re seeing people improve their speed by a factor of five with our automation and to some of these larger like asset grade projects up to 96 times faster than a lot of their traditional CAD-based workflows themselves. And so this is all being done in digital survey or browser-based tool that effectively has a suite of CAD workflows and GIS workflows internally and is able to deliver downstream into all of the existing CAD and GIS software that is being used for everything from design to asset management to safety planning…

Alex Baikovitz (20:24.268)
…and a wide range of other critical applications for our customers as well. And so a really key part of this is making sure that we’re able to integrate the upstream equipment manufacturers and people that have built the hardware and software for generating great point clouds that are super accurate.

And then working downstream with the CAD players like the Bentleys and Autodesk, as well as the GIS players like Esri and QGIS to provide a comprehensive workflow to move information from raw data and point clouds to finish products that designers and asset managers and others can use to make critical decisions overall.

Stewart Walker
So you import formats like, I don’t know, LAS, LAZ, E57, and then you output in formats, for example, for Autodesk and Bentley and Esri.

Alex Baikovitz
Exactly. So we take in like point clouds as well as imagery and that could be with a LAS, LAZ point cloud or an E57 with panoramic imagery or specialized point cloud formats for mobile mapping systems as an example. And Mach9 then delivers the CAD or GIS file formats that are accepted by the software, whether that’s on the CAD side like DXFs or CSVs to incorporate all of the information or assets that are being extracted as a part of the field to finish workflow while also being able to support those GIS file formats like shapefiles and geo databases and others that you can customize and deliver out of our software just overall.

Stewart Walker (21:55.118)
So the surveying and mapping companies which are operating in a incredibly competitive environment, they must be pretty excited about five times increases in speed or 96 times in special cases.

Alex Baikovitz
Absolutely. I think it’s just a matter of really continuing to see organizations get ahead on their projects themselves and deliver faster so that they can take on more work and deliver more profitably as well. And also be most competitive in those bidding situations where they’re looking to get ahead and continue to develop their practice. And I think it’s that efficiency and also the ability to start adopting a new solution that makes you faster without a lot of the long lead times and long times that it would take to get production teams up and running.

Really, what we find is with our customers, it takes a few days to really get users super efficient and productive in our solution and effectively are able to deliver on projects faster ahead of schedule and on budget or under budget as well. And so I think that’s just naturally super important in the space of surveying and mapping as well as construction service providers in providing solutions to their clients and engineers and others that they’re providing maps and solutions for.

Stewart Walker
Okay, so it seems from what you said so far that maybe and I don’t want to try to probe into your secret sauce or anything but two things your background in robotics gives you a slightly different view from let’s say software creators who’ve come from a more standard surveying and mapping background and then secondly you’re making…

Stewart Walker (23:37.846)
…intelligent use of artificial intelligence are these important components that make you different?

Alex Baikovitz
I would say that there are two really complimentary things that we’re combining here. One is the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to process and interpret 3D data, which is a naturally really hard problem. There’s been a lot of great solutions in natural language or image data processing, but 3D and spatial is the basis of this industry and that’s our core focus and competency as well. And then the second part is building these really powerful web-based CAD platforms and tools to be able to deliver specifically on geospatial projects faster. And this is certainly a really key capability of moving from desktop or on-prem to cloud to enable great collaborative experiences, very reactive applications, quick turnarounds and updates in terms of iteration.

A lot of the benefits that cloud has is also making dramatic impacts to the industry and also is providing us with the ability to enable customers by using models that cannot necessarily be run on their own desktop computers, but can be run in larger data centers where we can get results faster and provide experiences that could otherwise never be provided in the first place had it not been for some of the really powerful unlock of like the cloud itself. And so we’re excited about combining these two capabilities of our expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence as it relates to solving and addressing robotic perception problems.

And then also coupling this with the ability to provide a web-based CAD platform and tool to solve geospatial problems in a web browser, which is first in kind and continuing to advance day over day.

Stewart Walker (25:23.274)
Yes indeed okay well a couple of weeks ago your company sent out an e-blast describing recent improvements to digital surveyor especially with respect to the extraction of lines on highways could you tell us a little bit more about that what has it been important to add to the product.

Alex Baikovitz
I would say like one of the core functionalities that we’ve been investing heavily into is automated line work generation and creation for survey grade projects, extracting features like curb and gutter to sidewalks and striping, pavement geometry, so on and so forth that are just critical for hard surface extraction on a lot of these detailed surveying and mapping projects, as well as larger scale maintenance and operations programs for departments of transportation as well as a wide range of other transportation agencies that can leverage this software as well as their service providers, engineering consultants and surveyors themselves.

And so lots of exciting updates in the space of how do you extract, validate and deliver vector features for everything from survey grade projects at small scale to entire states and countries and providing solutions that solve problems for customers that are delivering on those wide range of types of projects.

Stewart Walker
Okay, now I’m going to ask a question I asked the same question of the Hexagon product director for a new hydrographic lidar, bathymetric lidar sensor. Are you needing to receive or make use of more and more customer data as training data in order to improve your AI models?

Alex Baikovitz
Certainly, we work with customers to make sure that they’re able to get the best modeling capability, as well as building a capability that has our own internal data that we’re using for model training and making sure that customers have complete control and ownership of their own data. So I think that’s another really important component of this is customers need to be able to own the data as well as the corresponding deliverables from these datasets. so Mach9 provides them with the ability to effectively control those outcomes.

Stewart Walker (27:32.546)
Now, in addition to the point cloud, do you make use of, for example, existing vector databases, building footprints, drawings of utility networks?

Alex Baikovitz
So, customers can ingest or bring this in to help support their project delivery itself. But certainly a lot of these open source or openly available data sets have actually been very helpful for the product itself. And we’ve been continuing to integrate these great layers that are helping affect a lot of different parts of the production workflow and accelerate these overall like integration that customers naturally are using on their day-to-day projects and consolidating this from the many different tools that they would use for project delivery or, you know, in general, we find that a number of surveying customers will use really about like five different types of software on their projects to provide a complete solution for their clients.

And we’re certainly helping them consolidate this and streamline those workflows by integrating those external data sources, whether they can provide the data themselves or we’re pulling directly from those APIs directly themselves and then helping aid them in accelerating the overall production workflow and solution that way.

Stewart Walker
Now do you have tools such as APIs or SDKs or libraries so that other software suppliers can leverage your core technology inside their products or do you view that as competition?

Alex Baikovitz (29:01.162)
We definitely don’t view this as competition. would say majority of our customers are engineering and construction and infrastructure organizations that are primarily using us for production applications. But we’re also really excited about some of our more recent collaborations with different software and developer organizations themselves that are looking to use our platform in a unique way and have those direct tie-ins.

And so these are definitely capabilities that we look to open up over time as more and more customers are looking for solutions to address this problem as a part of their own solutions and you know it’s certainly a core capability that we look forward to unlocking in the future is this great developer audience where people could be building solutions around Mach9 and Digital Surveyor specifically.

Stewart Walker
Okay, digital surveyor then it’s clearly your flagship product. Do you have other products as well?

Alex Baikovitz
So Digital Surveyor is our company focus. As a startup, you have to focus on making one thing really, really great. And so our general focus as a company is making Digital Surveyor a fantastic product and solution that is helping automate a lot of geospatial production workflows and accelerating how customers are extracting, validating, and delivering on their projects around the world. Today, this is our only product. In the future, we look forward to introducing new ones as well as continuing to enhance and make Digital Surveyor, the capability that helps make maps really fast, even at Mach9 speed.

Stewart Walker (30:28.138)
Okay very good right so tell us a little bit about them about your customers for example the market segments or the geography where they’re located around the world and also tell us about the laser scanners that they’re they’re typically using.

Alex Baikovitz
We started working with organizations in the United States, in Canada, or broadly like North America, and more recently have been expanding to new geographies and places where we have actually now customers around the world using our product and solution. We’ve predominantly focused on mobile mapping. So the Trimble, Riegl, Leica, NavVis, and other mobile and SLAM scanning, as well as terrestrial scanning solutions and devices to collect data along like corridors or on sites and a wide range of other types of project profiles.

And I would say serving the like surveying and mapping industry, as well as the engineers and others working in asset management and other core verticals in these critical infrastructure spaces has been a really great area to provide solutions and see this like exciting sense of scale as we support many, many organizations that have a lot of shared like common needs and feature extraction for their projects and supporting those like civil infrastructure projects around the world now.

Stewart Walker
Right, well, I had the pleasure of talking to you at the Hexagon Live Global event in Las Vegas earlier this year and then more recently you were back there at Trimble Dimensions which I couldn’t attend because of a clash. Do you have any special relationships with those companies or with Esri or with anybody else or are you just a completely independent company?

Alex Baikovitz (32:09.976)
We are an independent company. in general, we certainly work with these ecosystem partners in providing solutions for our mutual customers. And I think that’s a really important component of how we support organizations around the world and effectively scale together is critically important.

And I think certainly those relationships with the Trimble’s, Leica’s, Esri’s and Autodesk’s and others of the world are certainly helping us provide the best possible workflows, experiences and solutions for surveying and engineering organizations that are using all of our products and they need to be able to work effectively together to support their field to finish delivery as well. So certainly a lot of really exciting collaboration, great partners, and that’s how we really scale together and build something that’s great in a really powerful ecosystem in this industry.

Yes, one of the pleasures I’ve had for a long part of my career is visiting the surveying and mapping companies and seeing how they generate an edge by melding together software components from different suppliers and making it all work to get to that deliverable that meets spec and is finished as quickly as possible.

Alex Baikovitz
Absolutely, and it certainly comes down to like these companies have built really great solutions. We’re not replacing their specific solutions themselves, but certainly providing a workflow that can help move this data and create these valuable deliverables that people can use in their downstream cat or GIS software and solutions. And, you know, I think that’s a matter of just like fitting into the broader market and ecosystem as we work to build another really great company that will continue to collaborate closely with all of these great ecosystem partners and of having that solution that helps people take projects from start to finish.

Stewart Walker (33:58.03)
Super, okay. Well, to finish, can you say anything about your plans for 2026 and maybe even beyond that?

Alex Baikovitz
The space of geospatial intelligence, this is only really the beginning. There’s a lot of really exciting progress that we’re seeing just broadly in the world of technology in terms of being able to more intelligently find anything within any data set and turning 3D data into valuable information for the applications and use cases of today and surveying and mapping, as well as the many different types of applications that will exist in the future. Many, you know, we can’t even think of today because they will continue to come to mind as organizations bring them to fruition itself.

And so certainly for 2026, like excited to continue to see our automated feature extraction solution and production software scale in global markets. As we also introduce some really exciting new like platform and web-based-like CAD tool functionality for these geospatial projects that will really, really help a lot with solving some of the biggest challenges in this like survey grade project delivery and being able to do this for the enterprise scale or being able to do this for very, very massive programs.

And so really looking into the next year, like excited about our delivery on projects spanning these topographic surveys that are everything from one to 15 miles to even some of these very large scale statewide or countrywide projects and programs that are certainly really exciting opportunities to really leverage automation to see this delivery at scale.

So I think that ability to deliver those high quality results, regardless of scale and being able to continue to see a lot of really exciting product progress in that space and making customers exceptionally successful using Mach9 and digital surveyor will be a really, really exciting thing to look forward to in the year ahead.

Stewart Walker (35:53.378)
Alex Baikovitz, thank you very much indeed. I really enjoyed this conversation and I’m really grateful that you were able to participate in the LIDAR Magazine podcast series. You’ve given generously of your time today, but also for the quite lengthy conversations that we’ve had on your booth at various events. I’m sure that listeners will have become much more knowledgeable about your company and what it does. We wish you well with guiding your business and the technology in the years to come. I can see that your 25 people are going to be busy and there will probably be more people joining them.

Alex Baikovitz
Totally. Thank you so much for having us, Stewart. And if we were to add anything else, the kind of key thing that we are seeing broadly is AI is going to continue to become more and more powerful as a part of the geospatial industry and providing these solutions in geospatial intelligence. And I think one of the most important things is really considering not only throwing around this buzzword or this type of technology, but figuring out how does this effectively integrate into my workflow as it is today, and what will the workflows of tomorrow be?

I would say the magic button experience is not necessarily the core component of AI, as we will see it in the industry for years to come. I think it’s definitely how we collaborate with these systems and how we develop workflows that will help speed up our delivery and not replace our existing capabilities, our existing teams, but more so help us deliver on larger scale projects, be more competitive, deliver faster, as well as take on the projects of tomorrow that are maybe not currently possible to address with today’s current and existing workflows and the ways that we’re doing things more manually overall.

And so I’m really excited and optimistic as to what the future is going to look like and excited for 2026 being a year of like partnership and helping work with great organizations around the world and helping them scale with Mach9 and Digital Surveyor as a partner in their projects and helping them make maps Mach9 fast. So really looking forward to the year ahead. And again, I super appreciate you having me online here as well.

Stewart Walker
Thank you. And 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. And we hope that you’ll join us for forthcoming podcasts. We’re expecting some guests who we believe you want to hear.

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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, multi-core command line tools to classify, tile, convert, filter, restore, triangulate, contour, clip and polygonize lidar data. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

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