Letter from the CEO: Creating a Sustainable Reality

Treading lightly on the earth is not a box-ticking exercise for Matterport. It’s our origin story. We have digitized millions of buildings, destinations, heritage sites, almost any space imaginable, creating accurate 3D digital twins that can be explored and managed from anywhere in the world with just a web browser. Matterport is creating remote access to physical locations to greatly reduce the need to travel to them. Fewer boots on the ground leave fewer carbon footprints. 

Equally, creating a more inclusive, accessible world is not a new aspiration for us. It’s our business model. By making our 3D capture technology freely available to anyone with a smartphone, we are accelerating the digitization of the built world and opening it up to everyone regardless of their wealth, status, or geography. That has always been our purpose. And it’s reflected in our workplace where we strive to attract diverse talent, build equitable career paths, and foster a sense of belonging and pride for all our employees known as ‘Matterpeeps.’ 

Although this is Matterport’s first-ever environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report, it articulates the very values by which our company lives. With its publication and the ongoing evolution of our ESG strategy, we commit to keeping these values front and center in our business and using them to do better. 

Growing up in Detroit as the son and grandson of automotive workers, I was immersed in a world of heavy industry, tremendous overheads, and huge supply chains. My search for a faster, smarter, lighter way of doing things brought me to Silicon Valley and ultimately to Matterport. But I learned that even an asset-light business that exists in part to reduce human footprints can’t avoid a carbon footprint of its own. As we extend our global reach – 177 countries and counting – and continue to tap into the estimated USD $230 trillion asset class that is the built world, we recognize this must not come at a heavy price to humanity and the planet. We have to do better. 

In 2021, we launched our social impact program, Exploration to Equity, which aims to increase community inclusion and resilience by creating equitable access to spaces. We grant free access to the Matterport digital twin platform, services, and hardware to qualifying public schools, universities, and US-based non-profit organizations. These organizations bring historical landmarks, museums, and socially significant sites to life for people who might otherwise not be able to visit them, especially those from marginalized communities. Additionally, we support communities affected by extreme weather events and other disasters. When devastating tornadoes struck the Midwest in December 2021, we supplied disaster relief organization SBP with cameras and support to help them capture digital twins of damaged homes to help impacted families apply for federal assistance to rebuild their lives. 

In 2022, we began collecting data on our greenhouse gas emissions so that we can monitor, disclose, and reduce our impact over time. We are also favoring suppliers that do the same and I’m confident our new partnership with an environmentally responsible manufacturer will drive progress. 

If Matterport’s first decade was about digitization, our second decade will be about generating insights. We recently shared details about Property Intelligence, which uses our AI to transform digital twins into powerful insights, offering a scalable and effective alternative to the manual property evaluation and in-person assessments businesses perform today. This capability, which we expect to be available in 2023, should help support our customers’ own ESG efforts by leveraging the millions of data points embedded in their Matterport digital twins. For example, a property manager could quickly conduct a remote thermal load analysis on a building by considering factors such as its square footage, ceiling height, window dimensions, and orientation. This analysis would allow the manager to recommend ways for the occupants to reduce their energy consumption. The same fully automated analysis could also be applied to the manager's entire portfolio of buildings.

Our powerful digital twin solution can be easily customized and integrated into a variety of applications, giving users the ability to achieve their own data-driven objectives. This flexibility, combined with our extensive spatial data library of over 26 billion digitized square feet, makes us the leader in this field and a valuable resource for individuals and businesses to drive positive change. 

I’m very optimistic about the future, and eager to see how our solution will help customers gain new insights about their properties that support their own environmental, social, and governance goals.

RJ Pittman Chairman and CEO