4M Analytics secures $45 million to map US underground utility infrastructure

(UC) — Geo-data company 4M Analytics Ltd. has raised an additional $30 million in funding, bringing the total to $45 million raised, to fund the creation of a map of the United States' underground infrastructure.

Over the years the subsurface has turned into an enormous maze of utilities, one that was never recorded nor mapped. Every day more and more utilities go into the ground, and without a map, the risk of a utility strike increases creating delayed projects and additional costs. In 2020, there were more than 385,000 unique utility strikes that caused damage to underground utilities.

"Until now, the construction industry has been forced to plan in the dark, based on incomplete, unreliable, out-of-date utility information, spending months looking through paper records, chasing contacts over the phone, and looking onsite for utilities, one-by-one and inch-by-inch. When a project is completed the utility data is often forgotten, requiring that the next project starts from scratch to get the same data," Itzik Malka, CEO and co-founder of 4M Analytics, said.

4M Analytics' mission is to create the map product for underground infrastructure. The company has developed a digital repository of comprehensive utility data that is reliable, ready to use, and constantly updated. This will help engineers identify and pinpoint underground utilities early in the project lifecycle, accelerating and optimizing their projects. They will plan, bid, design, and build with greater confidence and higher ROI based on 4M's map.

“To give professional engineers a baseline of utility data that the different project stakeholders can actually agree on, we collect raw data from hundreds of thousands of sources – from remote sensing and satellite imagery to public records, conflate it together using a variety of self-developed AI capabilities, and verify it using both state of the art computer vision and proprietary mapping techniques," Malka added.

The United States was facing a $2.6 trillion infrastructure investment debt before the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law. The gap in investment meant the country dealt with poorly maintained infrastructure, costing individuals and businesses billions of dollars in lost time. Even though the construction industry will now receive additional funding to support the maintenance of the country's infrastructure, it still faces a lack of innovation that will impact the industry's ability to keep pace with the number of infrastructure projects.

By deploying data at scale, the 4M Analytics product, 4Map, compiles all utility data into one dashboard. With this data, customers can view utility data for countless infrastructure projects simultaneously through an intuitive interface. The mapping resources will decrease the amount of time it takes to locate underground utilities for civil engineering firms, engineering procurement construction firms, contractors, and subsurface utility engineering firms in the transportation, oil and gas, water and electricity, renewable energy, and telecommunications industries.

The funding will be directed towards the company's expansion into the United States, growing their team and scaling the platform. Now, 4M is breaking into the United States' construction industry to help professionals more efficiently update existing infrastructure and support further economic development.

The funding round was led by global software investor Insight Partners and ITI Venture Capital Partners, with participation from current investors, Viola Ventures and F2 Venture Capital. Also participating in this round were Noam Bardin, former CEO of Waze (acquired by Google), and Nir Erez, the CEO and founder of Moovit (acquired by Mobileye-Intel).

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