Google Maps for buildings

Dr Reinshagen, you co-founded NavVis in Munich in 2013. You have developed a positioning system with 3D navigation, precise to the nearest centimetre, that moves through interior spaces. Today, 220 employees work for NavVis and there are offices in New York and Shanghai. What drives you?

Our vision. All outdoor spaces have already been digitalised and made available through tools like Google Maps. This digital twin of our cities isn’t just useful for orientation purposes: it also provided a foundation for totally new business models. Driving-based services like Uber, Car-sharing, courier services and autonomous vehicles would not have been possible without digital maps and GPS – the technology opened up enormous new markets. Our aim? We want to create a platform for buildings that is comparable to Google Maps.

What exactly does that mean?

We do the same thing as Google Maps and Google Street View, but for buildings. We produce digital twins of offices, business premises and factories. There is barely any data about the interiors of these buildings. That’s where we come in. We have developed new technologies that make it possible to digitalise buildings quickly and make use of these data easily. This lets service providers and companies create photorealistic copies of their premises and interior spaces and make shared use of these. Let’s take a digital factory by way of an example. It makes it possible to make better operational decisions, increase productivity, optimise business processes and improve profitability.

There are around four billion buildings worldwide. What is your vision for the future?

That at some point people will expect that every building will have a digital copy, just like every town already does today. In ten years’ time, we want to have digitalised the majority of all buildings used for commercial purposes, at least. However, digital maps of buildings will only be the start. I believe that it’s going to be exciting to see what starts to emerge on the basis of our data. Just as Apple doesn’t develop every app itself, we want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to try out their own ideas.

As a former McKinsey consultant, you are one of the founders and you’re now the CEO. How did you divide up work within the management team?

While my co-founders were mainly responsible for inventing the technology behind NavVis and using it to develop products, my contribution was on the fundraising side, in building the organisation and in winning our first customers.

You are partly financed by the Munich-sided Yttrium (formerly known as Digital + Partners) growth fund, in which KfW Capital is invested among other capital providers. How did that help you?

Without our financing, NavVis would never have been able to grow so fast.

NavVis originated in a research project at the Technical University of Munich. How did that develop into your company?

The first prototypes and the corporate design were produced in cooperation with the Chair for Industrial Design. The biggest challenge was to find a suitable market for the basic technology that came from the university-based research. We needed that in order to ultimately develop the products that create sustained added value for our customers.

On this journey, what has been the biggest decision that you have taken as founders to date?

That’s easy. We took the risk of starting a company. Even though we all had other highly at-tractive options and we all knew that it would be very difficult to build a successful company from a basic technology.