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OpenSpace, an AI technology company founded in 2017, aims to bring new levels of transparency and efficiency to construction and real estate.

With its platform, builders automatically capture a complete visual record of a construction site, providing a single source of truth that increases coordination, drives accountability, and simplifies dispute resolution. 

OpenSpace, a reality capture company, announced a partnership with Nedbank, the largest commercial property financier in South Africa. Through this partnership, OpenSpace provides Nedbank’s clients with the ability to track site progress and improves communication across key stakeholders on the project. Nedbank can also use this information to reduce its risk profile, saving time and money. As Nedbank scales the use of OpenSpace across its portfolio, they currently have 25 active sites across Africa. 

“OpenSpace is an incredible tool that allows us to monitor construction risks proactively,” said Genevieve Naidoo, Divisional Executive: Property Finance PM, Valuations & Sustainability Nedbank CIB.

“Initially, we were concerned about the additional cost of the platform since property development projects are sensitive to extra costs. But the benefits of OpenSpace far outweigh the cost of the technology in terms of saving time for teams. Being able to pay our clients quicker creates a huge benefit for them and allows them to manage their cash flow cycles.” 

#OpenSpaceAI is partnering with @Nedbank to bring remote inspections to clients.

With OpenSpace, Nedbank was able to track site progress, improve communication, reduce its risk profile and more on its projects all across #Africa.

Read more: https://t.co/aUoDUe6W0x pic.twitter.com/G1H1BlX7ZY

— OpenSpace (@openspaceai) December 7, 2022

Nedbank began offering OpenSpace’s platform as a solution during the COVID-19 pandemic to clients in Kenya, Morocco, and Mauritius. When other banks could not or would not undertake development finance for their clients due to travel restrictions and lockdown regulations, making it challenging to monitor risk, Nedbank partnered with OpenSpace to offer a solution to its clients. 

OpenSpace enabled the Nedbank team and its clients to continue its inspections and allowed banks to pay clients on time and proactively engage with them on costly change orders and potential delays. Nedbank’s clients can monitor job site conditions from any location and communicate using OpenSpace’s core functionalities, including the Field Notes feature. 

With OpenSpace Capture, users attach an off-the-shelf, consumer 360° camera to their hard hat and walk the site as they normally would. Once the video from the walk is uploaded to the cloud, OpenSpace’s computer vision technology stitches images together and pins all the images to the floor plan, creating a trusted visual record of site status. Powered by the company’s Vision Engine, the site image map is typically ready to view about 15 minutes after upload. 

“As industry professionals look for digital solutions to maximize their time and increase collaboration across countries, we believe it’s important to make their lives simpler and easier,” said OpenSpace CEO and co-founder Jeevan Kalanithi. 

“We are proud to be partnering with Nedbank as they look to scale their clients’ use of OpenSpace, and we are excited for the opportunity to bring time and money savings across their portfolio.” 

To date, our customers have used OpenSpace to capture over 11 billion square feet of imagery from active construction projects across thousands of sites in over 91 countries. 

Top Photo: Hard Hat with Camera (photo provided by bulleitgroup.com)