German digital-twin company Navvis has raised €25m of fresh funding to fulfil its mission to digitise commercial buildings and assets.

The funding follows its recent €20m debt funding from the European Investment Bank to solidify its technological position, leveraging its momentum fuelled by the need for up-to-date digital twins in construction, Industry 4.0 and the metaverse.

Navvis specialises in reality capture and digital twins. The company is on a mission to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world by enabling immediate access to building information, anytime, anywhere.

Its product offering includes reality capture technology, which allows for rapid digitisation of buildings and assets, and cloud-based digital twin software for the manufacturing and construction sector.

Navvis has received €25m of fresh equity funding that complements the recent €20m debt funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB), raising the total investment to €85m.

Around construction sites, factories and other commercial buildings, planners, engineers and operators struggle with non-existent, unreliable or inaccessible data. Therefore, people are often required to be on-site. Pandemic travel restrictions, climate considerations and the need to digitise processes and disconnect them from the physical building and assets amplify these struggles.

Navvis provides detailed, reliable and easily accessible data of buildings and assets fast and at low cost. This does not only account for cost and time savings during planning, implementation and operations, but also allows for faster decision-making and reduced time to market.

“At Navvis, our mission is to grant immediate access to reliable information about buildings from anywhere in the world,” said Georg Schroth, Navvis’ CTO and co-founder. “This information is the foundation for almost all processes that touch the world’s most valuable asset class – the built environment.”

Navvis achieves this with its reality capture technology and SaaS platform to provide immersive access to buildings from any place, especially in the manufacturing and construction industries.

The company plans to leverage the investment to expand operations to meet the demand for its 3D scanning and digital-twin technology. In addition to accelerating geographical growth, it also plans to scale its R&D teams to strengthen its technological position in slam (simultaneous localisation and mapping) software, reality capture, visual positioning and digital-twin technologies.

The round was led by Cipio Partners, with additional capital from previous investors, BayBG, MIG, Target Partners, Digital+ Partners and Kozo Keikaku Engineering.

“We are excited to have the experienced and tech-savvy team from Cipio Partners leading this funding round,” said Felix Reinshagen, Navvis CEO and co-founder. “And we are proud of the vote of confidence from our existing investors who all also contributed. Spatial data are a fundamental building block for digital twin technology and many industrial applications. Augmented reality and the metaverse need spatial data at scale to fulfil their promise. This new funding will allow us and our customers to capture and work with spatial data at unseen scale and utility.”

Ansgar Kirchheim, venture partner at Cipio Partners, added: “I have been following Navvis for a few years and after joining Cipio Partners reached out immediately. Their ground-breaking technology enables the easy digitisation of the built environment, which, combined with strong leadership, has allowed Navvis to grow strongly. They have really seized the market opportunity and we are very much looking forward to supporting Navvis to become the one-stop shop for all reality capture and digital twin needs.”

Bridging the gap between the physical and digital world, Navvis helps service providers and enterprises capture and share the built environment as photorealistic digital twins. The slam-based mobile mapping systems generate high-quality data with survey-grade accuracy at speed and scale. Based in Munich, with offices in the USA and China, Navvis has customers worldwide in the surveying, AEC and manufacturing industries.