- Dan Ciprari is CEO of Pointivo, the corporate providing the algorithms and technology behind a number of the largest in-house drone-based asset inspection programs within the country. As Pointivo expands their portfolio to incorporate complete products sold under their very own label, the Pointivo name is becoming more prevalent in asset inspection and data analytics.
![](https://dronelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Dan-Ciprari-Headshot-214x300.jpg)
Dan Ciprari, CEO Pointivo
DRONELIFE had the chance to talk with Dan about how Pointivo developed, why he selected to take a position in drone technology, and the way the space is evolving.
Analytics: the Biggest Challenge, the Biggest Value Add
Dan had sold a previous enterprise and was in “give-back mode,” coaching other entrepreneurs with an area incubator at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center, ATDC, when he met Pointivo co-founder Habib Fathi, now the Chief Science Officer, leading Pointivo’s AI team. Fathi invented Pointivo’s foundational capabilities before business drone use became mainstream: integrating computer vision and AI/ML to speed up processes around asset inspection, applying those concepts to structural systems. The corporate holds patents on several core capabilities: from capturing data, constructing accurate models, and analyzing and presenting leads to useful and priceless ways.
“We began working on cellular phone capture, scanning a room or a house for estimates on siding or window replacements,” Dan explained. “We began with the power to extract structure from imagery, and eventually learned the right way to extract conditions and other data from that imagery.”
“When drones got here into play, we knew the analytics were going to be the largest challenge – and the largest value add. Drone imagery opened up much larger enterprise markets like roofing, insurance, telecom, solar, construction, infrastructure.”
“In those early days, everyone focused on the right way to fly drones and the right way to capture data: but our focus was to offer analytics. Pointivo was contacted by a premier drone service provider early on, and we white-labeled or sat behind most of the early drone portals and platforms as their analytics provider.”
Investing in Drone Technology
Dan says as drones became viable within the business market, the team realized that they’d be a wonderful capture device. Investing in Pointivo checked all the boxes for an incredible opportunity. “For me, investing on this software platform met all of my critical criteria for what I desired to do next. There was a big market opportunity for the technology, but we were a primary mover, with numerous room to develop recent IP and patents,” he said. “We could possibly be revolutionary, pushing the sting of what was previously possible. And Habib was the proper co-founder: super intelligent, ethical, and works incredibly hard.”
That early decision to maneuver forward led to Pointivo being a part of most of the earliest proof of concept projects for drones, with their technology deployed in multiple industries with Fortune 500 firms and drone ecosystem leaders.
Why Drone-Enabled Asset Inspection Will Be the Latest Normal
Drone data analytics and asset inspection is a comparatively recent field. In recent months, nevertheless, adoption in traditional industries has grown: and Dan says that can only proceed. “Within the physical asset inspection space, drone capture is ideally fitted to situations with real pains in manual processes,” he said. “Manual processes are sometimes expensive, error-prone, and might be dangerous. There are at all times very hard-to-reach areas when inspecting a physical asset. It’s painful to collect data between handwritten reports, speadsheets, and pictures: and it’s difficult to share across diverse teams.
“These pains are real operational issues – and our solutions solve all of them. Workforce shortages have develop into an actual issue too: with more work and fewer people, reliable partners and easy-to-use automated platforms are essential. Our tenure in automating AI-driven analytics has helped us create a game-changing platform, and one demo shows the difference.”
Pointivo has deployed solutions in many alternative industries. For solar system design, Pointivo generates engineering as-built drawings of roofs including all installed equipment, their heights, parapet partitions, and surrounding vegetation. “Estimators fly a drone as a substitute of climbing a roof, and by the point they get back to the office, the roof CAD is of their design software ready to finish their solar designs: it’s super accurate, and it’s fast,” Dan explained. “Digital twins enable designers to virtually return to the positioning from their desk to resolve any outstanding questions.”
The opportunities for drone-based asset inspection are infinite, and Pointivo has worked in lots of them: inspecting offshore equipment, or dangerous flare stacks within the oil and gas industry; automating inventory and conditional assessment inspections of transmission towers for a number of the largest utilities on the earth; providing consistent, unbiased conditional assessments of business roofs and facades.
“Within the telecom space, identifying revenue opportunities is a highly regarded topic now: but we’ve been doing it for years,” said Dan. “We fly a cell tower, develop a digital twin and all its components, compare it to existing contracts, and discover where revenue is mismatched with what’s deployed. Tower owners are gaining thousands and thousands of dollars using our solution; we’re analyzing 10s of 1000’s of towers per yr.”
“We also can discover unused space on the tower, confirm its dimensions, allow the tower owner and their customers to visualise that space, mock up additional installations, and think about the encircling area, all using previously-captured data.”
The Next Evolution of AI-Enabled Asset Inspection
Asked how he sees the space evolving, Dan paints an image of recent levels of automation, leveraging the web of things. “Enterprise customers are going to require one other level of automation to justify ROI. They need to know that drone programs don’t just provide higher data but additionally deliver results they’ll quantify,” Dan said. “We already see that customers need to see outputs that speed up their existing business processes – they need to avoid one other platform to learn or spend time in. In the long run, our solution (and the industry) can be nearly fully automated.”
With the rise of Drone in a Box (DIAB) solutions, Pointivo sees drone deployments strategically place to offer full geographic coverage of infrastructure and other assets. Drone flights can be fully automated: and analytics engines will determine what happens next: whether to 1) simply log the information and evaluation and store it, 2) initiate a service call or follow-up event to handle identified issues, or 3) send an alert for human review of leads to real-time or asynchronously.
“People can be relieved from repetitive inspection-related tasks through advances in AI-driven analytics,” Dan said. “People will become involved only when there’s an exception that the AI engine cannot resolve.”
Lessons Learned
As a CEO of an organization in an emerging sector, Dan has had the chance to see which firms adopt recent technology – and which of them won’t. “You actually should take heed to the client – when in recent emerging markets, the client often desires to learn from us, the perceived experts within the space. Still, we must listen as to whether they’re experiencing the pain points we expect or whether it is something else,” said Dan. “We now have spent numerous time with firms that aren’t ready or not an incredible cultural fit for brand new technologies. But we’re partnered with some great firms fully vested in leading their industries. These firms have the foresight to comprehend the ROI possible with a properly implemented drone-based solution.”
“You’ve got to be flexible, and meet the client where they’re – we’re working with innovators, game changers, and slow-to-change organizations; they need various things and require different approaches. It’s critical to satisfy customers where they’re, as a substitute of applying the one-size-fits-all mindset.”
“Also, trusting your team is critical. We now have an incredible group of dedicated and super-smart team members who genuinely imagine we’re on the suitable path and are fully committed to making sure customer success.”