Looq AI launches AI-enabled digital twin platform

Innovative AI technology set to enable true asset intelligence of critical utilities infrastructure at scale.

Looq AI has launched its groundbreaking AI-enabled digital twin technology, the Looq platform, a one-stop solution for surveyors, engineers, contractors and asset owners to digitally map the physical world infrastructure in minutes, with survey-grade accuracy, enabling them to build a safer, more sustainable and electrified future.

Powered by a novel and fundamental computer vision and AI technology, the Looq platform now enables the frequent, and large-scale digitisation of critical infrastructure for true asset intelligence. Established in 2021, Looq AI is a hardware enabled AI company dedicated to advancing critical infrastructure digitisation and diagnosis. Looq’s founders and scientists have developed a new camera AI technology that makes survey-grade 3D capture cost-effective at scale with AI-enabled workflows, simplifying the process of generating geometrically precise, geo-referenced and intelligent digital twins.

The utility sector faces unprecedented pressure to maintain, expand and improve the electric grid. Across inspection of existing assets, the development of new structures, and the repair of disaster struck areas, organisations have an urgent need for timely and accurate information to power key decision-making and operations. These design, construction and operation efforts constitute large and complex projects requiring careful multi-agency planning to ensure safe, timely and budget-friendly execution. A single mistake can lead to hazardous conditions and cost millions of dollars.

To resolve these challenges, organisations need intelligent, collaborative and accurate digital twins, however, the broad adoption of digital twins and the ecosystem supporting them has been hampered by the high cost and the time and resource burden needed to capture large-scale datasets on a time-frequency needed for effective decision making.

“We have developed a fundamentally different way of creating these accurate digital twins leveraging cameras instead of lasers,” said Dominique Meyer, CEO at Looq AI. “Our cameras offer over a hundred times higher spatial sampling rates compared to top-of-the-line laser systems, enabling our customers to capture the data they need within minutes, and at a scale that they previously could not do,” she said.

“The use of this technology is a game-changer for us. It gives us the opportunity to capture a large amount of survey-grade data without drones or hours and hours of boots-on-the-ground labour,” said Amanda Jones, owner at surveyors AJS.

The Looq platform is a deep technology stack assembling an end-to-end solution for digitising the built world. Looq’s proprietary ‘Q’ camera system allows data to be captured in the field within minutes, which gets processed with Looq’s AI based image-to-model software in the cloud to create geo-referenced 3D digital twins and topographic maps with survey-grade accuracy and AI semantic information.

Using the Looq platform, project teams can now interact with the digital twin models and AI-generated information to complete a multitude of engineering, surveying, analysis and coordination tasks. This gives them bottom-line operational savings and importantly, makes it feasible to get access to the complete information needed for critical decision-making.

Looq AI has also successfully secured $2.6m in a preferred series seed funding led by BootstrapLabs, a venture capital firm focused on applied artificial intelligence and with the participation of Longley Capital and Spatial Capital. In conjunction with its initial pre-seed round, Looq AI has raised a total of $3.75m to date.

“We are grateful to be backed by some of the world’s most forward-looking investors in the applied AI space, exactly where Looq is focused. The addition of BootstrapLabs, Longley Capital and Spatial Capital to our investor base will accelerate Looq AI to the next stage of growth,” said Looq CEO Dominique Meyer.

Benjamin Levy, co-founder and general partner of BootstrapLabs, said: “Looq’s product is remarkable, as it not only combines the latest advances in hardware, AI and computing technologies, but it also accelerates the very digitalisation of our world, generating troves of unique data upon which the company will build its AI moat.”