4M Analytics, an Israeli startup that offers subsurface utility mapping services, raised an additional $30 million in funding, bringing the total raised for its Series A round to $45 million. The funding round was led by global software investor Insight Partners and ITI Venture Capital Partners,
Founded in 2019 by Itzik Malka, Yoav Cohen and Nir Cohen, 4M Analytics has developed an AI-powered engine that maps the subsurface, depicting the exact location of any man-made subsurface infrastructure. This makes it possible to pinpoint any known or unknown utilities or infrastructure within a given area.
By combining remote sensing and computer vision, the 4M system generates digital mapping simulations with reliable current data in a very short timeframe.
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So why is this important? Well, how often have you heard about a new construction project that needed to be halted because of something that they found underground? When they start a new project, a construction company must first excavate the ground and put supports for whatever they are building in place. Now let’s say that they unexpectedly come upon a local water main, or cable line.
A fortune can be lost due to the delays arising from such problems. The larger the project, the more money wasted. In addition, the contractors must now spend time and money finding a way to move such underground, or a way to move it.
What can be even worse is if the construction proceeds without first discovering such underground infrastructures. Now imagine what could happen to a neighborhood, or even an entire city, if the local phone lines or water pipes are destroyed in a construction accident.
4M Analytics’ mission is to create the map product for underground infrastructure. The company has developed a digital repository of comprehensive utility data that is reliable, ready to use, and constantly updated. This will help engineers identify and pinpoint underground utilities early in the project lifecycle, accelerating and optimizing their projects. They will plan, bid, design, and build with greater confidence and higher ROI based on 4M’s map.
“Until now, the construction industry has been forced to plan in the dark, based on incomplete, unreliable, out-of-date utility information, spending months looking through paper records, chasing contacts over the phone, and looking onsite for utilities, one-by-one and inch-by-inch. When a project is completed the utility data is often forgotten, requiring that the next project starts from scratch to get the same data,” said Itzik Malka, CEO and co-founder of 4M Analytics. “To give professional engineers a baseline of utility data that the different project stakeholders can actually agree on, we collect raw data from hundreds of thousands of sources – from remote sensing and satellite imagery to public records, conflate it together using a variety of self-developed AI capabilities, and verify it using both state of the art computer vision and proprietary mapping techniques.”