Matterport Is Going Public to Digitize the Built World
By Peter Hébert
Want to hear a mind-blowing fact? How about this: there are at least twice as many buildings in the world as websites.
Within those buildings there are often multiple rooms, spaces, floors, and sections. And virtually all of those buildings are stuck in the past. They have not been digitized, making it time consuming and costly to manage them in an online world.
But that’s changing quickly, accelerated by today’s announcement that Matterport plans to go public on the NASDAQ through a business combination with Gores Holdings VI, Inc. [NASDAQ: GHVI]. The deal will provide for $640 million in gross proceeds at a post-transaction value of up to $2.9 billion. Lux is excited to make a new investment into the PIPE, alongside Tiger Global, Senator, Dragoneer, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and Miller Value Partners.
I could wax poetic about how I instantly saw the future Matterport was building and recognized that their approach would emerge as the global standard in digitizing the physical world. But I won’t, because it wouldn’t be true. Like a number of now-extraordinary mega-scale tech companies (think Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Shopify and Airbnb), the true transformative global potential of the technology platform those companies were building was by no means obvious at the outset. Lux led Matterport’s Series A financing to back their exceptional technical founders, Dave Gausebeck and Matt Bell, and their conviction that capturing and indexing physical spaces would be valuable.
Which markets? TBD. Geographies? We shall see. But imagine the possibilities of what you could do once all those spaces came online.
The reality is that turning a building into a 3D digital twin is exciting and a great first step in realizing that mission. But the even greater value comes from the insights you can gather with the world’s largest spatial data library of digital twins made up of every type of physical space imaginable.
Want to know the average square feet of apartments in London? Piece of cake.
Maybe you want to know how many lightbulbs are in the average medium-sized office in New York? Easy peasy.
How about figuring out how many homes in New Zealand need to upgrade their windows to achieve maximum energy efficiency? Give me a few seconds to get you that data.
Today, Matterport transforms buildings into data. Tomorrow, that data will increase the value of every space.
Over two decades ago, Google set about indexing the world’s knowledge and making it accessible to every human on planet earth. Today Google is one of the world’s most important and valuable companies. With $640 million in capital from the world’s leading technology investors, Matterport will be able to fully realize its mission of digitizing and indexing the built world.
At the heart of Matterport is a purpose-driven company and leadership team, with decades of experience from some of the greatest companies in the world, including Apple, Google, Salesforce, and LinkedIn. We’re excited to be on this exciting journey with CEO RJ Pittman and the team at Matterport.
With less than 0.01% of the built world digitized, space really is, as they say, the final frontier.
Congratulations Team Matterport on this meaningful milestone! But we’re really just getting started.
