Swedish Spotscale raises $1 million to further deploy drones to map buildings in 3D

Spotscale, enabling real estate owners and city planners to precisely create digital and physical models of buildings and their surroundings through the deployment of multi-rotor drones, have announced they've closed a $1M seed round in order to scale up operations.

The Swedish company have been up and running for 18 months, benefitting from the rather relaxed laws currently surrounding drones in Sweden, to gain their first customers in the real estate and construction markets where their solution is aimed at.

In fact, founder Ludvig Emgard told me that he believes we will soon see more drone-friendly regulation elsewhere too:

We believe that drone permissions all over the world will change soon as many countries are in the process of regulating to finally stabilise in our benefit. Drones will be a natural part of our future and we do our best to prove that drone data has far more pros than cons and take full responsibility for safety and privacy.

Sweden has always been at the forefront of technology and very early on embraced the possibilities to create rules that provide balance between business opportunity and privacy.

Emgard has previous in 3D mapping, having been Head of Product in the founding team at C3 Technologies, a company that created sophisticated processing technology for building 3D maps, and bought by Apple in 2011, for what was thought to be around $240M.

Up until now Spotscale have been bootstrapping, but feel the time is now right to raise money to help them to accelerate the development of their drone technology. The $1M seed round is led by MOOR Capital, a Stockholm based fund set up by the owner of Rovio (creators of Angry Birds). The round also includes angel investors Magnus Malm and Erik Byrenius, and Almi Invest.

There's clearly a big commercial opportunity here, although the market is probably not fully formed yet, however as companies become more aware of, and more comfortable with 3D printing, drones , augmented and virtual reality, then Spotscale look set to take advantage, sitting at the intersection of these technologies.