Australian infrastructure technology company Trendspek has raised $6 million to turn drone inspection data into 3D asset records.

The funding round, led by OIF Ventures, will accelerate Trendspek’s product development, expand its technology partnerships and increase its presence in North America and Europe.

The move comes as advances in robotics, sensors and artificial intelligence create new ways to collect information about critical infrastructure.

Trendspek says it provides the software layer that brings these technologies together, turning data from drones, ROVs, LiDAR, photogrammetry, BIM and other sources into a persistent 3D record of an asset.

Inspectors, engineers and asset teams can use that record to inspect, measure, annotate and compare condition over time, without being tied to a single capture technology.

Trendspek’s founders, Derek Feebrey, Fiona Church and Mitch Deam, were former Qantas pilots who went on to build one of Australia’s first commercial drone companies. They saw increasingly sophisticated capture technology producing more data, but little infrastructure for turning that data into a usable record of the asset.

They say they built Trendspek in 2019 to solve that problem.

“Every year, the technology available to capture an asset gets better. Better cameras, better sensors, better drones,” said Derek Feebrey, the company’s CEO.

“The challenge is making all of that information useful once you’ve captured it. That’s where we’ve always been focused; giving all of these technologies somewhere meaningful to go, and giving engineers the context to act on what they find.”

Trendspek says more than 860 organisations globally have used its technology across more than 1,700 sites, including critical infrastructure, oil and gas, ports, telecommunications, universities and transport, with data from multiple capture technologies brought into the same 3D asset record.

Trendspek is also developing AI capabilities that operate directly on these 3D records, with the new funding to accelerate this work.

“Trendspek has built the condition layer that owners of some of the world’s most critical assets now rely on, and the dataset behind it compounds with every inspection,” said Oliver Darwin, investor at OIF Ventures.

“We’re incredibly excited to be backing Derek, Fiona, Mitch and the team as they build the global standard for how critical infrastructure is managed.”