Tencent leads $10 million investment in SenSat to create real-time 'simulated realities'

SenSat, a geospatial technology startup that digitizes real-world places for infrastructure projects, has raised $10 million in a series A round of funding led by Chinese tech titan Tencent, with participation from Russian investment firm Sistema Venture Capital. Founded out of London in 2015, SenSat is setting out to help organizations, such as those working in the construction, mining, and energy industries, create so-called "digital twins" of locations relevant to projects they're working on. The company said that it translates the real world into a version that can be understood by machines and thus suitable for training artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These digital twins are constructed using various different data-types, including real-time data generated from wearables, physical sensors connected to assets on the ground, traffic data, and 3D image data captured from satellites, Lidar, and drones. Indeed, SenSat is actually one of the U.K.'s biggest drone data providers, due in part to its Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) license that enables it to fly fixed-wing drones up to 12km away from the pilot -- in other words, far beyond the controller's line-of-sight.