Technology provider powering major infrastructure projects raises $20.5m (£16.7m) in Series B funding round - led by National Grid Partners.

Funds to accelerate international expansion and product development underpinning Infrastructure automation

 Sensat has raised $20.5m (£16.7m) in Series B funding in a round led by 

, with the participation of existing investors. Sensat is a leading digital twin company with a mission to digitise the underserved construction industry and bring efficiencies to the development and operation of large infrastructure projects.

The funds will help Sensat to drive digital automation in infrastructure projects in the energy, rail and telecommunications sectors, which have traditionally lacked the productivity gains that have been a by-product of the rapid digital adoption that has occurred in other sectors.

Sensat helps infrastructure owners and their construction partners deliver on time and on budget by facilitating team collaboration, uncovering hidden risks, eliminating site visits and acting as a window into the entire project. Teams can visualise and collaborate on high resolution, multi-layered digital twins, resulting in faster project completion, fewer missteps, lower costs and superior project performance.

Today more than $150bn worth of assets worldwide are planned, built and managed with Sensat software.

The investment from National Grid Partners, the corporate venture capital and innovation arm of National Grid, augurs a prominent role for digital twin technology in the smarter management of utility infrastructure projects.  National Grid’s footprint in the US market will help Sensat to understand the specific needs of the US customer and better tailor the platform to address the market.

“We are delighted to welcome National Grid Partners as a shareholder and look forward to serving utility customers in the UK, US and beyond, bringing a new era in digital automation for the utility and wider infrastructure sectors.

Ian Cooper, Head of European Venture Capital at National Grid Partners added: “

Many of the world’s largest infrastructure projects already use Sensat to digitise the planning, development and management of their infrastructure projects and enhance team collaboration – eliminating the largely manual processes and data silos that characterise traditional project management. We hope to see Sensat become the leading digital twin solution for infrastructure projects in the utility industry and beyond.

Digital Twin Software Company Sensat Raises $20.5M USD  to Automate the Way Infrastructure is Planned, Built and Managed

Algorithm assesses thermal imaging and high-resolution photogrammetry visualised in Sensat to predict where water leakage is present

 Sensat, the leading visualisation and collaboration software company for civil infrastructure, today announced a pilot study to automate the detection of leakage in the water network to support United Utilities’ commitment to reduce leakage by another 15% by 2025.

It is the latest innovation to be trialled by North West water firm United Utilities as part of its strategy to reduce leakage and maintain resilient water supplies in the future.

Greg Larner, United Utilities’ leakage technical officer, said: “With shifting weather patterns, due to climate change, there is an increased risk of periods of drought, so it is important for us to explore the latest technologies to reduce water wastage and protect the environment. We’re increasingly collecting vast amounts of data about leakage, so artificial intelligence is becoming a key tool in helping to make sense of it.”

The water firm is no stranger to trying new technology in its battle to beat water leaks. As well as using specially-trained sniffer dogs to sniff out leaks, United Utilities has also teamed up with inventors, as part of its Innovation Lab challenge, to develop the FIDO artificial intelligence solution which is now in use around the globe. FIDO uses machine-learning and AI to pinpoint the location and even the size of the leak, just by the noise it makes.

By utilising unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology to remotely map thermal data, combined with high-resolution photogrammetry, Sensat has developed a probability-based algorithm that assesses vegetation stress, terrain relief and thermal scans to predict where leaks might be along trunk mains in rural areas. This new approach to identifying leak locations more efficiently over a wider survey area is enabling United Utilities to take remedial action faster and more cost-effectively. Working closely with the United Utilities’ leak detection experts in an invaluable feedback loop, the validation of results will further inform the models, meaning the algorithms will improve their accuracy over time at predicting the leaks, providing further efficiencies in the future.

“When you consider that the reliable supply of water underpins almost every aspect of human life and the threat of climate change will mean we will have to prepare for a drier future, it’s vital that we work together to tackle the challenges that are affecting the water industry,” said James Dean, CEO at Sensat. “Our visualisation platform identifies leaks through geospatial mapping and its probability model is enabling a collaborative approach for analysis, removing the need for manual inspections to significantly reduce the time and cost for detecting leaks. This supports United Utilities’ commitment to securing resilient water supplies on track and our commitment to helping companies be more sustainable by reducing wastage.”

The successful completion of this trial will open up the exploration of further use cases for data beyond leak detection to help deliver the appropriate level of resilience that the water network needs for the long term.

United Utilities selects Sensat to undertake pilot leak detection study

Golden thread of information provides the missing link for overarching site accessibility, planning and coordination for the length of the scheme

 Sensat, the leading visualisation and collaboration software company for civil infrastructure, has successfully mapped and brought together all past, present, and future data of Canada Water’s 53-acre site in one digital replica, working with partners British Land, a leading UK property development and investment company, and Amodal, information management firm for the built environment. Providing an up-to-date visual resource, Sensat is ensuring British Land and their delivery partners can better understand the site and its constraints to expedite options appraisal process, feasibility reporting, and risk evaluations.

Embarking on an ambitious £4billion project to redevelop Canada Water’s 53-acre site, British Land, in partnership with Southwark Council, are developing an outstanding new town centre for Southwark and London communities that complements the local area, making an active, positive, long-term contribution to local life. As part of the Canada Water Masterplan, British Land selected Amodal and Sensat to provide a complete overview of the entire site, where multiple teams and project stakeholders can easily visualise site conditions without having to be on site, supporting project decision-making, contingency planning, and frictionless collaboration.

“The ability to both accurately scan the site, and confidently pull together lots of disparate data into one single platform, is amazingly powerful. The speed of iteration really helps for quicker options appraisal, more efficient handover processes, and better clash detection to reduce contingency costs. It’s been an invaluable resource when thinking through phasing,” said David Walters, Programme Director at British Land. “Adopting a Common Visualisation Environment® (CVE), such as Sensat’s, enhances our visualisation capability and has proven instrumental when it comes to data validation. By scanning the site using drones, and displaying this highly-accurate data in Sensat’s platform, we have been able to establish disparities between the actual locations of assets and their previously documented locations. Spotting problems early, ahead of the design phase, means we can significantly reduce the level of risk contingency costs, which could easily be into the millions.”

Amodal was commissioned by British Land to help them translate the complexity of the project, and all its building information and processes into the digital world in order to continually evolve and identify efficiencies throughout the lifecycle of the project. “Organising all historical and current project information into a CVE takes having an oversight of the multiple data layers that make up a project, up to a new visual level,” said Thomas Whiting, Managing Director at Amodal.” Sensat was able to complement the data sets used on British Land’s existing software to enhance the visualisation and user functionality of current (and future) data sets, providing a seamless transition from an existing Common Data Environment (CDE) to CVE. This golden thread of information is allowing for better stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and integration across teams.”

“Being part of one of the largest mixed-use regeneration projects in London has demonstrated how bringing all the right information together can really change the dynamic of a project for the better. A masterplan of this cost and scale could easily become fragmented, falling foul to misaligned incentives, behaviours, and objectives, as well as delayed delivery timetables due to unreliable data, but we have helped overcome this and accelerate planning,” said James Dean, CEO at Sensat. “It’s only when you see comprehensive information on existing assets, above- and below-ground utilities and infrastructure, as well as surveys and inspections, visually in one place that you can support collective problem-solving and mitigate the risks. We look forward to continuing to be a key enabler for smart planning to help partners build better and see the ​​wider knock-on benefits this will have on other stakeholders linked to the masterplan.”

Sensat, British Land and their delivery partners create a “digital twin” in major step towards Canada Water Masterplan

Unlock the power of information and increase project certainty with new Sensat features and ISO 27001 certification, including:

Project timeline—record plans, activities and progress over time.

Time-based markups—assign start dates and deadlines to marked-up activities for forward planning and project predictability.

Icons and labels—markup a site to flag risks, potential issues and logistical plans with greater context.

Fly to coordinates—create explorations of your site for powerful presentations.

Folders for all your data—organise data to easily find the latest surveys, markups and files for tasks.

ISO27001 certification—The International Information Security Management System (ISMS) standard for data protection.

 Sensat, the leading visualisation and collaboration software company for civil infrastructure, today announced new industry-defining features to its platform, to help teams plan, build and manage construction projects. 

Developed in partnership with its customers for some of the most critical and large-scale infrastructure projects today, Sensat’s new features help project managers build a time record across a site and project lifecycle, and plan time-based activities that increase confidence and clarity, but also improve forward planning capabilities. Flying between a site’s locations using coordinates and adding visually descriptive icons and markups is now possible within Sensat, providing more site context on conditions and constraints, and simplifying decision-making for stakeholders. While organising all project data into folders —from point cloud surveys to design files and boreholes to land ownership data—improves a team’s understanding of tasks and increases productivity.

These are amongst the latest tools to help project managers reduce risk and increase project certainty in the decisions and plans, alongside new video tooltips for an improved user experience. Sensat has also achieved the ISO 27001 certification, which underpins the robustness of its security management system and data protection processes and policies.

“We are continually developing the Sensat platform to meet the needs of our customers, allowing them to access and use all available site information to have more control of outcomes, reduce risk, limit unforeseen events and increase certainty in the delivery of their projects. Our Common Visualisation Environment® (CVE) surfaces the information users need when they need it, including BIM data, topographical and geospatial information, while keeping one record of the project that means everyone is on the same page with project plans and team communications,” said Sensat’s Chief Product Officer, Michele Battelli.

“Project managers and other stakeholders now have better context and clarity around activities on site. Our timeline feature helps them create a long-lasting record of plans, events and the reality of what has happened or will be happening throughout the project. In turn, this gives them more control over change orders or anything that can derail delivery time or budget.”

Until now, it was impossible to view a timeline of a site’s information including surveys, designs, markups and visual tags all in one place. When combined with Sensat Continuous, the capabilities of Sensat’s platform allow users to receive regularly updated survey data that provides a reality capture oversight of changes and project progress on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. As a time record of all the project data is built, project stakeholders can visually compare site changes and progress, giving them more certainty of outcomes and helping them collaborate effectively to resolve issues and reduce risks.

This is not all, upcoming Sensat features include:

 platform users can have conversations in context within the platform’s 3D and 2D environments to solve problems and exchange information faster. 

 integrate time lapse and video feeds into projects from on-site security cameras, allowing users to monitor events in real time and providing access to live information.

 Sensat mobile will allow users on site to collaborate more effectively with remote teams, tap into subject matters knowledge to resolve issues faster and report risks. 

“Sensat is the most advanced decision-making platform to control risk and outcomes of a civil engineering project through powerful visualisation of a wide range of information and data that people can access anywhere from any device. As an assurance record, Sensat eliminates uncertainty from projects, meaning they can be delivered on time, on budget and more sustainably. This is the future of civil infrastructure,” concluded Battelli.

Reduce infrastructure project risk with Sensat information visualisation in 4D

 Sensat, the leading next-generation digital twin technology startup, today announces strategic partnership with Gammon Construction Limited (‘Gammon’), Hong Kong construction and engineering company, to integrate all drone-captured topographical, asset, and real-time operation data into its advanced digital platform, to help Gammon deliver infrastructure projects more efficiently through real-time visualisation of project data anywhere, anytime.

“There is a huge pipeline of infrastructure and railway developments in the Hong Kong region to meet with the rapid population growth and transport demand, which calls for the need of a capable future-proofed digital platform to store, manage and analyse the project data in order to facilitate efficient project management and delivery,” said Paul Evans, Executive Director & CTO of Gammon.

Sensat’s platform is a cloud-based Common Visualisation Environment® that allows project managers to layer, locate, and compare site data over time across teams, and visualise dynamic project performance, accessing site data remotely. Sensat turns complex visual and spatial data into what is described as “contextual simulated reality” designed to enable computers to solve real-world problems. Over the past years, Sensat has been involved in delivering one of the largest strategic unmanned air vehicle surveying jobs in the UK across the entire phase one route of HS2, and is part of their Innovation Accelerator initiative, set to target HS2’s innovation challenges of productivity, the environment, and the circular economy.

Sensat’s partnership with Gammon aims to bring its success in delivering digital assets in the UK to Hong Kong.

“At Gammon, it has been a common practice for our projects to use drones to capture project data. This together with the increased digital data collection from IoT (internet of things) sensors and computer vision on our sites, means we are starting to see the criticality of having a versatile data platform to process and analyse this data to generate insights for project management. Sensat’s technology is by far one the most advanced in fulfilling such needs,” Evans said.

“It’s such a pleasure to be partnering with Gammon, a like-minded digital disruptor committed to pushing boundaries with construction innovation, while having a clear vision of excellence founded on safety, sustainability and absolute integrity,” said James Dean, CEO at Sensat. “It’s an exciting time of growth for the region, and to be a part of changing and reshaping the industry with new ideas and methods marks a boost of development in Hong Kong and a key step up in international expansion for Sensat.”

“This is an exciting partnership between Gammon and Sensat which again demonstrates the interest in tech collaborations between the UK and Hong Kong,” says Corin Wilson, Director, Trade & Investment, UK Department for International Trade. “The UK has a long pedigree and a world-class reputation in developing and utilising innovative technology to optimise the built environment. By investing in our domestic capability around digital twin technology in the UK, we are innovating and developing new products in digital asset management which can improve the design, planning, delivery and safety of the built environment worldwide. In places like Hong Kong, home to forward-thinking construction companies like Gammon, those technologies can make a real difference. We are keen to continue working with Hong Kong industry and government so that we can bring our innovative technologies to make the world’s cities more sustainable, responsive and smart.”

Gammon and Sensat have been working together to perform a few pilot trial projects in Hong Kong, aiming at demonstrating value to the client, as well as showcasing the integration together with digital technologies, including the BIM Cave in the Immersive Smart Lab in Gammon Quayside headquarters.

For more information on the offering from Gammon/Sensat, visit 

Sensat and Gammon join hands to speed up digitalisation of city spatial information to meet huge infrastructure development demand ahead

 British AI company closes Series A funding round led by Tencent, to invest in UK tech talent and help build a more sustainable future.

Sensat​, the UK company using artificial intelligence to unlock value in the Infrastructure industry, by using digital representations of real-world locations, today announces a $10 million Series A funding round, led by Tencent, with participation from Sistema Venture Capital.

The new capital will be used to support growth, enabling Sensat to expand its London team of 30 experts by more than three-fold over the next year, focusing on data scientists, mathematicians, software developers and creative problem solvers, as well as driving continued international expansion.

Sensat creates digital representations of real-world locations – otherwise known as digital twins – infusing real-time data sets from a variety of sources. The result is an accurate, digital and up-to-date copy of the real world in a machine-readable format. This enables offline industries, such as Infrastructure, to make more informed decisions and accurate analysis, driving vast improvements in safety, cost-efficiency, waste generation, project collaboration, and carbon reduction.

$94 trillion in Infrastructure investment is required by 2040 to sustain global growth predictions, yet Infrastructure is one of the least digitised sectors in the global economy, lacking the automation and transparency that has transformed online industries. This lack of digital impact has also meant that much of the industry relies on traditional and inefficient ways of doing business, resulting in a tremendous amount of waste. Combined with the environmental degradation and resource waste linked to unsustainable growth, a particularly compelling case can be made for introducing AI and digital automation to physical sectors.

“Sensat has a simple but profound goal: to build the third platform, an intelligent eco-system that translates the real world into a version understandable to AI. This technology will help us to build a more sustainable future, using the wealth of new insight to help people make better decisions. Our plan is to first focus on perfecting our human-controlled digital twin technology, so we can help to transform the way we deliver Infrastructure,” explains James Dean, Co-Founder and CEO of Sensat.

“Using AI-powered digital twin technology to replicate the real world in a digital capacity is the next step towards using data to make better decisions, not only in Infrastructure but in how we impact the world as people. Sensat has scaled rapidly in the past year, and we have big plans for this first major round of investment, adding to our world-class AI expertise, and enabling fresh partnerships with innovators in a range of different fields. With Tencent, we share similar ambitions about the impact of enterprise internet on laggard industries and how that can lead to us operating our world more sustainably.”

At the heart of Sensat is their visualisation platform, which allows Infrastructure companies to interact with their workplaces digitally for the first time by allowing digital automation to help them make better decisions with real-world data. Despite only launching in 2018, the start-up is already transforming the industry, with Sensat providing major value to more than 30 international Infrastructure companies. As part of a project with Murphy Group for the National Grid, Sensat digitised a 52 km underground transmission line as a part of the Triton Knoll offshore wind farm project, resulting in reducing time on site by 200%, as well as vastly reducing the impact on local wildlife thanks to less invasive methods. Most recently, Sensat worked with Berkeley homes, recreating the physical environment digitally for the development of 10,000 new homes. Their assimilation of thousands of separate data points into a single view, meant that Berkeley were able to accelerate their design and decision making process by 8 months, whilst also providing a powerful tool for future public consultation.

Harry Atkinson, Co-founder and Chief Data Officer of Sensat added: “Infrastructure is the only sector to have had a 0% net productivity increase since the 1960s, with a history of inefficiencies in doing business, contributing to a staggering 61% of total UK waste. The result is an estimated $5.2 Trillion direct economic loss per year. Knowing this, we see a huge opportunity in allowing computers and AI to analyse the real world in order to help us grow more sustainably – an area which Sensat is pioneering.”

Dr Ling Ge, Chief European Representative at Tencent Holdings, who will be joining the Sensat board, explained: “We are delighted with our investment into Sensat, which aligns well with the ambitions of Tencent’s Cloud and Smart Industries Group. We believe Sensat is well positioned to introduce mass digital automation to offline industries that have not yet engaged in the digital revolution; and we look forward to Sensat applying its platform to a broadening range of smart industries.”

Sensat raises $10M as investors back

13 key customer wins including Network Rail, Osborne, Connect Plus, EWR, Morgan Sindall and Aecom

Key hires including CPO, CRO and CMO to strengthen leadership team as company scales and grows

, a leading provider of data capture and visualisation solutions that enable digital representations of the real world, is pleased to announce a year of growth despite the global COVID-19 pandemic hitting in the first half of 2020. Following a successful $10 million Series A funding round led by Tencent this time last year, Sensat has gone from strength to strength, significantly exceeding its revenue targets, developing its data capture and SaaS business models and adding to its tier one accounts, bringing the number to over 45.

Sensat has also doubled its team of experts in less than a year, with a focus on bringing in a breadth of experience across product development, operations and marketing with key appointments including Michele Battelli as Chief Product Officer (CPO), Sophie Carter as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), and Maria Hudson as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

As a product leader bringing 15 years experience from Google and McKinsey, Michele Battelli has joined Sensat as CPO, responsible for shaping Sensat’s core product, and driving adoption as part of the company’s go to market strategy. Prior to joining Sensat as CRO, Sophie led some of the largest deals for Microsoft before advising over 20 startups on their commercial initiatives, and will drive the company’s commercial strategy and evolution. Maria Hudson joins Sensat as CMO from content solutions leader SDL, having previously headed up global marketing teams across telecoms and tech, and will be responsible for Sensat’s marketing effort as the company moves into its next stage of growth.

Commenting on these recent hires, James Dean, CEO and Co-founder of Sensat, said: 

“We have extended our team at a pivotal time not only for the industry but also for our growth as a UK tech startup. Throughout Sensat’s evolution to date, we have purposely sought to hire experienced leaders earlier than many comparable businesses, and have done this primarily from later stage venture-backed businesses or those that have successfully transformed for market relevance. Our hypothesis is that leaders who have experienced rapid growth and scale will be better equipped to help Sensat navigate its own scale journey.”

 Sensat has increased its overall team size by 116% over the past year, which now includes team members in both Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Italy, where the company has opened offices and operational entities.

Sensat is also continuing to transform the industry by building robust digital infrastructure sites, through its drone data capture and common data visualisation environment, which is now relied upon by some of the world’s largest civil infrastructure companies. The startup recently named Network Rail, Osborne, Morgan Sindall and Aecom as clients and, in the last year, is bringing a wider variety of data sets into the platform, which in turn is opening up new use cases for its clients and helping them contextualise their site(s). Other significant milestones for Sensat include capturing real world data for 26 projects across more than 95 square kilometers, resulting in 1.1 topographical imagery and data, decreasing time from appointment to capture from five to two days and adding terrestrial and mobile scanning as a default capture offering.

Looking back at what we’ve achieved, we really have had a strong year at Sensat and upscaled the business, not only by exceeding our revenue targets, but also in how we are developing our platform, enhancing our team and changing the mindset of the civil infrastructure companies in terms of how they think about and use digital data. With every enhancement to our platform, we are able to provide never accessed before data-driven insights for the civil infrastructure and AEC (architecture, engineering construction) companies, laying the foundation for real-world digital replication that drives smarter decisions, greater efficiencies and cost control, increased revenues as well as a more sustainable built environment. This is just the start of things to come

News: Press release

Digital Twin Software Company Sensat Raises $20.5M USD to Automate the Way Infrastructure is Planned, Built and Managed

United Utilities selects Sensat to undertake pilot leak detection study

Sensat, British Land and their delivery partners create a “digital twin” in major step towards Canada Water Masterplan

Reduce infrastructure project risk with Sensat information visualisation in 4D

Sensat and Gammon join hands to speed up digitalisation of city spatial information to meet huge infrastructure development demand ahead

Sensat raises $10M as investors back

Sensat hits major milestones a year on from Series A funding including treble digit growth, Tier One customer wins and key leadership hires

See Sensat in action