Subterranean mapping startup Exodigo Ltd. said today it has gotten a $96 million boost after closing on a Series B funding round led by Zeev Ventures and Greenfield Partners.

Existing investors 10D VC, SquarePeg and JIBE also participated, alongside new investors Vintage Partners and Leblon Capital. The round brings Exodigo’s total amount raised since launching in 2021 to $214 million, but it declined to mention a valuation.

The company is trying to transform the way construction, infrastructure building and utility firms address the risks of digging underground by generating subterranean intelligence. Its artificial intelligence tools and sensors essentially let them see what’s underground, so they can spot things like buried pipes, cables and utility assets. This makes designing and constructing new buildings, highways, subways and other infrastructure projects much faster, avoiding the risks associated with blind excavation.

According to Exodigo, its target market spends more than $100 billion per year on unnecessary excavations and drilling to see what lies underground. The reasons they do this are numerous, such as the need to discover underground water resources or oil, or to avoid hitting gas pipelines and other manmade hazards. Besides being expensive, there’s a huge environmental penalty for these kinds of excavations, with the heavy machinery employed causing significant pollution.

Exodigo has developed an underground mapping platform that combines AI with various kinds of sensors, geophysics software and 3D imaging tools to exhaustively scan what lies beneath any constriction or infrastructure project site to see exactly what lies beneath the surface. The data it generates is converted into extremely accurate 3D maps that provide positional accuracy for things such as pipelines and cables within just a few inches or centimeters, fusing them with above ground imagery so it becomes clear exactly where they lay.

Exodigo co-founder and Chief Executive Jeremy Suard says his company is setting new standards for 3D subterranean intelligence in an industry where up to 50% of underground utilities are missed, and often damaged as a result.

“We bring that to 99% accuracy without any digging,” Suard said. “We see unlimited potential for the expansion of our underground mapping innovations as leaders around the globe push to understand the underground.”

The startup says it has already gotten a lot of traction, with more than 50 transit agencies, departments of transportation, municipalities and utility firms globally now using its software regularly to improve the safety and efficiency of their underground projects. Its clients include the National Railroad Passenger Corp., California High-Speed Rail Authority, Gateway Development Commission, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and others. Meanwhile, since closing on its last round of funding in February 2022, it has doubled its team to more than 400 employees.

In the last year, the startup says, it has helped to derisk more than $75 billion of federal, state and local infrastructure investments in the U.S., executing utility scans across 18 states across many different terrains. Its systems have been deployed in major cities such as Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Seattle, where the volume of subsurface utilities creates enormous risk.

Exodigo says the reason for its rapid growth is clear. It cites a study by McKinsey & Co., which shows that governments and companies spend more than $100 billion on drilling and excavations every year to try and discover what lies underground. By scanning instead of excavating, these customers can save tremendous amounts of money.

Zeev Ventures Founding Partner Oren Zeev said Exodigo has created an entirely new category of software and market for underground sensing. “It’s driving unprecedented growth with infinite opportunities for expansion across underground investigation applications,” he added.

Exodigo said it intends to use the funds from today’s round to intensify its research and development efforts, with a view to creating a new geotechnical risk reduction product. This will leverage multiple sensors and AI algorithms to enhance subsurface investigations by providing insights into rock and soil properties, groundwater levels and other important details that can inform engineering design.

Photos: Exodigo