As blogged on ZDnet.com, OpenSpace, a company that utilizes helmet-mounted cameras and some fancy stitching software to create “Street View”-like scenes of jobs in progress, has just landed $14 million in Series A funding. The company’s tech is deployed globally in construction projects worth more than $50 billion.

I covered OpenSpace last year when the company emerged from stealth.

“Office workers have had the ability to create, edit, share, and revisit their work for a long time, but that has never truly existed in the construction industry,” Jeevan Kalanithi, co-founder of OpenSpace, told ZDNet at the time. “That’s because creating, storing, searching, localizing, and indexing visual data from the real world has never really been possible until now.”

OpenSpace uses artificial intelligence to automatically create navigable, 360 degree photo representations of any physical space. Affixed to builders’ hardhats, cameras passively capture imagery in the background as workers walk the site. OpenSpace’s algorithms map the photos to project plans and stitch them together. The navigable space, which contains layers of data across the life of a project, becomes a kind of time machine, allowing users to navigate a site at any previous stage of construction. That’s useful for client tours, for example, but also to measure progress and spot potential delays, overruns, and inefficiencies before they become problems.

Keep reading on ZDnet.com