In 2007, a doctoral student at Stanford's GPS Lab put a strange idea on paper: could a camera, not a satellite, tell you where you are indoors? Georg Schroth was working on his doctorate at the Technical University of Munich, and that visit to Stanford is where the NavVis story starts, six years before the company existed.
GPS fails under a roof. That is the itch Schroth chased. Back in Munich, at the university's media technology chair, he and fellow PhD researchers Robert Huitl and Sebastian Hilsenbeck turned the idea into a research project: match what a phone camera sees to a stored image map of the building.
A Series A that year, led by the Bavarian state fund BayBG with MIG, paid for it.
Research papers do not pay salaries. What changed things in 2013 was an outsider. Felix Reinshagen, a McKinsey consultant, joined the three scientists, and the project became a company with support from the university and its entrepreneurship centre.
The first products were not phone apps. They were machines. The M3, a trolley wheeled through corridors that captured images and laser data, launched in 2014, alongside a web viewer. A Series A that year, led by the Bavarian state fund BayBG with MIG, paid for it. In 2015 came €7.5 million from Target Partners and the American angel Don Dodge.
The turn was quiet. Mapping buildings for navigation was a small market. Mapping them for owners, engineers and builders, who needed an accurate digital copy of a factory or a construction site, was a large one. NavVis opened in New York in 2016 and Shanghai in 2018, the year it raised $35.5 million and won the university's presidential entrepreneurship award.
The hardware kept shrinking, from trolley to a wearable scanner in 2020 and handheld devices later. The software viewer was renamed IVION in 2021. Today the company counts over 300 employees from more than 60 nationalities and lists more than 2 billion square metres of buildings and sites on its platform.
The lesson is in the sequence. A research idea about GPS indoors was right about the problem and wrong, at first, about who would pay. The founders kept the technology and changed the customer. It took six years from a doctoral sketch to a company, and a consultant who knew how to sell.