Bentley acquires Cesium to iTwin 3D GIS workflows

Sep 6, 2024 | Hot Topics

I am still trying to get caught up on earnings digests, but this just jumped to the head of the queue: Bentley Systems just announced that it had acquired Cesium, makers of a very cool platform for creating (and using) geospatial applications; its 3D Tiles is a de facto standard for streaming large 3D geospatial data sets, and its Cesium ion SaaS platform delivers 3D geospatial apps across many platforms — to (Bentley’s numbers) more than 1 million active devices every month. Bentley also says that Cesium’s open-source offerings have seen more than 10 million downloads to date.

Back up. What’s geospatial? 2D? 3D? It is a representation of objects and data that are referenced to an agreed-upon grid covering the earth. It used to be just 2D: utilities underground, real estate plot boundaries, demographics (such as income or size of household), and so on. Your home and street are likely in a geospatial data set for your municipality. However, if you live in an apartment building or work in an office tower, that data used to be abstracted; today, 3D GIS includes vertical information (up or down).

Almost all governments create and manage geospatial data for planning, taxation, and other purposes. Still, this data has significant commercial application: Think about New England’s favorite coffee chain, Dunkin’ (Donuts). Many Dunkin’ outlets are franchises, and franchisees never want to be too close to (or too far from) another outlet. Dunkin’s parent company used GIS to map out population densities, combine that with data about frequent coffee/donut buyers, and the location of competitive outlets and other factors to optimize the location of each franchise. Without GIS, this would have been more of a guessing game; with GIS, it became an exercise in applying disparate data sources. GIS matters, in both the public and private domains. 

Cesium fits here because it can present complex data in news ways. It actually started in the CAE world when Analytical Graphics, Inc. (later acquired by Ansys) needed to visualize objects in space. That led to the creation of a virtual globe application, which ultimately became Cesium in 2012. Even though it was originally created for aerospace, Cesium is today used across defense, AEC, urban planning, real estate, and other verticals. 

So, why Bentley? According to Bentley, “the combination of Cesium [and Bentley’s] iTwin [platform] enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality, and enterprise data to create digital twins … that scale from vast infrastructure networks to the millimeter-accurate details of individual assets—viewed from land, sky, and sea, from outer space to deep below the Earth’s surface.” Adds 
Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins, “A 3D geospatial view is the most intuitive way for owner-operators and engineering services providers to search for, query, and visualize information about infrastructure networks and assets. With the combined capabilities of Cesium and iTwin, infrastructure professionals can make better informed decisions in full 3D geospatial context—all within a single, highly performant environment.”
 
I love the example Bentley included in its press release: Komatsu is the world’s second-largest construction equipment maker. Its intelligent excavators, bulldozers, and dump trucks collect time-based 3D geolocated data about the earthworks in construction sites. With this data in Cesium, it’s “easy to compare plans with reality.” Did the dozers move the right amount of soil from the right place? Is the slope at the correct angle? And, bottom line, do we pay the dozer company for the work completed? Dump trucks charge by the yard; did they haul the correct amount of fill? And so on. (See more here about the initial implementation: https://cesium.com/blog/2020/03/10/smart-construction/ ) Chikashi Shike, executive officer of Komatsu’s Smart Construction Promotion Division, adds this in Bentley’s press release about the Cesium acquisition: “With Cesium as part of Bentley, we can further enrich our Smart Construction digital twins with engineering models, subsurface data, and more, for safer and more efficient construction projects.”

This sounds like a done deal, and it appears many (all?) of Cesium’s key people have joined Bentley.  Patrick Cozzi, the creator of Cesium and 3D Tiles and CEO of Cesium, becomes Bentley’s chief platform officer and will lead the development of the combined Cesium and iTwin platform offerings. I look forward to meeting him at Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure in Vancouver next month. Fan.
 
Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. I don’t know what Cesium’s current revenue is, but  I can’t imagine it’s material to Bentley’s likely $1.3 billion sales in 2024. FWIW, I do have a note that Cesium raised $5M in a Series A round in 2019.

GIS, by its nature, has a lot of open/standard aspects: data comes from many sources, has to be combined with other data to create value and then be served out to so many varying user types. What Dunkin’ needs to know in order to place outlets is completely different from what my town needs to plan its road maintenance program — but all has a common core. Cesium, 3T Tiles and iTwins together should streamline these workflows while also making this data more accessible to new types of users.


Title image credit: NASA.


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