Matterport CEO on going public and the future of 3D technology

RJ Pittman, Matterport CEO, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company going public and his outlook for 3D technology.

Video transcript

- I want to throw some statistics at you. This is according to our next guest. There are four billion buildings and 20 billion spaces worldwide. Quote, "the built world is the largest undisrupted market with less than 1% digitized." Ah, but there is now a company trading publicly as of today that's going to tap into this 230. This is the figure, $230 trillion worth of global real estate. Let's welcome into the stream RJ Pittman, Matterport CEO. And RJ, there is certainly a huge market out there to tap.

But let me just describe it this way. What you do is the cool thing. If I want to go look at something, then imagine what stuff would look like, you digitize the space which allows me to then interact. I don't have to go, right?

RJ PITTMAN: Exactly right. We digitize all kinds of buildings and spaces, from homes, to hotels, high rises, office spaces, factory floors. We've been matter porting for 10 years. And we have buildings digitized in over 150 countries. And millions of buildings and spaces have been matter ported. But as you said, it's just the starting point against that massive opportunity of over four billion buildings.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah RJ, talking to us about the expansion opportunity here are really the runway for your company to grow, now that you are a publicly traded company, I guess what kind of advantage do you think this gives you now against some of your competitors or some of the other players in this space?

RJ PITTMAN: Sure. Well as I mentioned, we are the first mover, and we're the category leader in this space. And we've largely defined the category that has set us up for tremendous success. So we have been honing the technology, perfecting product market fit across a number of big verticals, including the enterprise. Some of our most exciting companies today are coming in from the Fortune 1,000 onto the Matterport platform. And these are some of the largest real estate companies in the world, and some of the largest technology companies in the world that have huge swaths of real estate that they all want digitized for just about everything, from construction planning, or space planning to come back to work post COVID.

Or in the case of a hotel, to be able to promote it in such an immersive way that the future guests actually get a feel for what it's like to actually be there before they book a room or book a vacation.

- Where do you find resistance though? Because there are competitors out there. You mentioned that you're the first. But it seems as if there's still a long runway just for you to run.

RJ PITTMAN: There's no question. And look, because of the advantage we have, we're the only company out there that, first of all, can create these digital twins automatically. This is all done in AI. It's a data science problem that's made it hard for other companies to scale to our magnitude. I mean, to put it in perspective, we're digitizing and creating digital twins to the order of about 250,000 buildings and spaces every month. And we have the capacity now to take that up to the millions of spaces per month.

And part of this transaction represents two things. I mean, clear validation for the position we have, the scalability that's in our platform. We brought the biggest investors in the world into Matterport because they see the opportunity as well. And then second is, it's a huge global market. And we've become a bit of a household name here in North America. But that's fast becoming true in Europe and now Asia as well. And so we're really going to be investing in scaling this model that we've been proven out for the last 10 years.

SEANA SMITH: RJ In terms of what the customer, what people want over in Europe and in Asia compared to what they want here in the US, I guess how does that differ?

RJ PITTMAN: Yeah. The interesting thing is buildings are buildings, whatever country they're in. We digitize them the same way. The market demands, one of the things we heard a few years ago is they wanted simplicity. They wanted easier access to this technology, which generally is pretty sophisticated. And so about two years ago, we started working on a strategy to democratize 3D capture, make it as easy to create that 3D digital twin as it is to take a photo with the iPhone in your pocket.

And in fact, we launched Matterport for iPhone. It was a breakthrough technology experience in May of 2020. And it was extraordinary. We 20xed the customer base of Matterport in less than 18 months. And the uptake from there has just gone exponential.

- RJ, there's nothing more aggravating than the real estate companies that say, take a tour. And then it's just a series of still pictures that slide by. Where is the greatest potential growth here? Is it the commercial side, or is it the private, the household side, people like us who might want to just look at real estate because we want a bigger plate.

RJ PITTMAN: That's right. So let's remember, residential real estate is $160 trillion of that $230 trillion asset class. So that's always going to be a very exciting market for us. And it should be a big part of the business. But the fastest growing part of Matterport today is the enterprise. I mentioned, we took out 13% of the Fortune 1,000 shortly after launching Matterport for iPhone. Because what that tool represents is a very easy try before you buy. And so we have corporations doing space planning, construction planning, and large scale facilities management.

So we have retailers with literally tens of thousands of physical locations. And they're moving to virtual facilities management very much like Zoom has virtualized communications in the enterprise. This is a game changer. And there is a lot of square footage, for example, of retail space. And we've made it so easy to do this at scale now.

- RJ, we appreciate your being here. The ticker by the way so people can check it out as MTTR. RJ Pittman is CEO of Matterport. Congratulations on going public.